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Songbook QUOTES

Songbook QUOTES

1 " I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. ... It's the best part of us probably ... "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

2 " Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

3 " Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

4 " One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

5 " It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

6 " In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorus at seances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop-music equivalent is our obsession with B-sides and alternate versions and unreleased material. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

7 " One can only presume that people who say that their favorite record of all time reminds them of their honeymoon in Corsica, or of their family Chihuahua, don't actually like music very much. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

8 " We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. 'What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. "Get it on / Bang a gong"? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?' And the correct answer - 'Two seconds, and it doesn't matter' - is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you're hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

9 " Songwriting is an art distinct from poetry. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

10 " It is important that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do all these things all the time? Can’t we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer? "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

11 " that night taught me one of life’s most useful lessons, one of the only pieces of advice I have to offer to younger generations: YOU’RE ALLOWED TO WALK OUT! "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

12 " A couple of times a year I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of all the new songs I've loved over the previous few months, and every time I finish one I can't believe that there'll be another one. Yet there always is, and I can't wait for the next one; you need only a few hundred more things like that, and you've got a life worth living. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

13 " I will always be grateful to her for creating in me the narcotic need to hear her song again and again. It is, after all, a harmless need, easily satisfied, and there are few enough of those in the world. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

14 " All sorts of pieces of music are constantly being described as ‘sexy’, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’d want them to accompany lovemaking. Most of them, in fact, are sexual substitutes, rather than sexual accompaniments – music for people who aren’t getting any (or won’t be until they get home) rather than people who are. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

15 " How could there be a bad song called ‘Iron Man’, or ‘War Pigs’, or – my cup ranneth over – ‘Rat Salad’? "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

16 " Songs are what I listen to, almost to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t listen to classical music or jazz very often, and when people ask me what music I like, I find it very difficult to reply, because they usually want names of people, and I can only give them song titles. And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don’t like them as much as I do "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

17 " And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when other people don't like them as much as I do. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

18 " Я не презираю классическую музыку за то, что ее культивируют, я не сноб наизнанку. Мне она не нравится (или, по крайней мере, я к ней равнодушен) потому, что она звучит архаично, за то, что она никак не касается чувств, составляющих содержание дня сего, недели и всей жизни, а еще я не люблю ее потому, что в ней нет бэк-вокалов, басовых партий, гитарных соло, а еще потому, что многие люди, клянущиеся ей в верности, на самом деле не любят никакую музыку и никакую культуру, и потому еще, что в детстве у меня была другая музыка и классика не способна затронуть мои чувства, и еще потому, что мне не нужна никакая другая музыка, которая «лучше», чем моя. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

19 " Любой аккорд, простейший строительный материал для любой глупейшей песенки, в то же время является прекрасной, таинственной и совершенной вещью. И когда полуграмотный, некультурный и эмоционально несдержанный хряк объединяет несколько аккордов, у него появляется уникальная возможность создать нечто мощное и прекрасное. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook

20 " Сойдемся на том, что самыми долговечными являются песни о любви. Песни о работе тоже хороши. Также песни о реках, о родителях, о дорогах. Хорошие песни о детях необычайно редки (да, сложно писать о чувствах к своему ребенку так, чтобы других не стошнило, но каким-то же образом песенники научились выдавать безукоризненные, порой перехватывающие дыхание песни о топ-моделях, встреченных ими в клубном туалете, без возникновения подобного эффекта); а песни о любимых животных вообще недопустимы. Песни о наркотиках – особенно песни, претендующие на описание девочек, но получающиеся о наркотиках – уже не имеют того очарования после того, как ты заканчиваешь школу и не остается никого, кому бы ты мог объяснить их скрытый смысл. "

― Nick Hornby , Songbook