Salon des Voix 




Words that seem to be (and perhaps are)

speaking with the Toreador voice











Music, the greatest good that mortals know

And all of heaven we have below.

 -- Joseph Addison









"Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one."

 -- Stella Adler










"In the books I read the sinners are always more interesting than the saints, and in real life good people are dismally dull.  I've no desire to be wicked, but I do want to be happy.  A short life and a gay one for me and I'm willing to pay for my pleasure if it is necessary."

 -- Louisa May Alcott, A Long Fatal Love Chase









"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness."

 -- Woody Allen









Has anyone ever told you

you've got the most beautiful eyes?

I really do mean it.

D'you like fast cars?

 -- Adam Ant, "Playboy"









"There was never a genius without a tincture of madness."

 -- Aristotle









"Wit is educated insolence."

 -- Aristotle









"Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life."

 -- Antonin Artaud









"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"

 -- Jane Austen









"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."

 -- Johann Sebastian Bach










"The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

 -- Walter Bagehot









"The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."

 -- Russell Baker









"It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time."

 -- Tallulah Bankhead









"The good die young -- because they it's no use in living if you've got to be good."

 -- John Barrymore









From Satan or from God, what matter? Angel or Siren,

What matter, if you make -- fairy with velvet eyes,

Rhythm, perfume, light, o my only queen --

The universe less hideous, each moment less strained?

 -- Charles Baudelaire, "Hymn to Beauty"










"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures."

 -- Henry Ward Beecher









"Art!  Who comprehends her?  With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?"

 -- Ludwig Van Beethoven









"True art is selfish and perverse -- it will not submit to the mold of flattery."

 -- Ludwig Van Beethoven









"A kiss is a rosy dot over the 'i' of loving."

 -- Cyrano de Bergerac









"This wisdom descendeth not from above, it is earthly, sensual, devilish."

 -- The Bible, James 3:15









Egotist:  A person more interested in himself than in me.

 -- Ambrose Bierce









"Exuberance is Beauty."

 -- William Blake









"If a thing loves, it is infinite."

 -- William Blake









"Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained."

 -- William Blake









"The lust of the goat is the bounty of God."

 -- William Blake









They don't walk, they just glide in and out of life

They never die, they just go to sleep one day

 -- David Bowie, "Sons of the Silent Age"









"I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent."

 -- Ashleigh Brilliant









"Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness."

 -- Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls







"The devil's most devilish when respectable."

 -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning









Misled by fancy's meteor ray,

By passion driven;

But yet the light that led astray,

Was light from heaven.

 -- Robert Burns, "The Vision"









"A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword."

 -- Robert Burton









"Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure."

 -- Lord Byron









"The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none."

 -- Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand









"The only difference between reality and fiction is fiction has to make 
sense."

 -- Tom Clancy









In Xanadu did Kubla Khan,

A stately pleasure dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

 -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan"









QFM:  Quelle fashion mistake.

"It was really QFM, I mean

painter pants? That's 1979

beyond belief."

 -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X









Knee-Jerk Irony:  The 

tendency to make flippant 

ironic comments as a reflexive 

matter of course in everyday 

conversation.

 -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X









"Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity."

 -- Charles G. Dawes










"Only the passions, only great passions, can elevate the mind to great things."

 -- Denis Didrot









"In science, one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

 -- Paul Dirac









She has robes and she has monkeys

Lazy diamond studded flunkies

She has wisdom and knows what to do

She has me and she has you

 -- The Doors, "Love Street"










"To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die with thee again in sweetest sympathy..."

 -- John Dowland









"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius."

 -- Arthur Conan Doyle









"When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind."

 -- John Dryden









When I close my eyes,

I see the flames of truth,

dancing to the malevolent 
rhythms of the night.

Dancing,

Dancing in the windows of my mind.

 -- Ebony









"The music is a living thing. You have to listen to it and let it breath."

 -- from the movie Eddie and the Cruisers









"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

 -- Albert Einstein









"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the source of all 
true art and science.  He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who no longer pauses 
to wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as good as dead."

 -- Albert Einstein









"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities."

 -- Albert Einstein









There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

 -- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"









"Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning."

 -- T. S. Eliot









"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

 -- T. S. Eliot









"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.  But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

 -- T. S. Eliot









"No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written:  he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing."

 -- T. S. Eliot









"Art is a jealous mistress."

 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson









"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."

 -- Susan Ertz










"I don't want life to imitate art.  I want life to be art."

 -- Carrie Fisher










"Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life.  Don't let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity."

 -- R. I. Fitzhenry









"One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a solider."

 -- Gustave Flaubert









"Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French for 'life jacket'."

 -- Julian Barnes, from Gustave Flaubert's Parrot









"Love's tongue is in the eyes."

 -- Phineas Fletcher









"Only connect!  That was the whole of her sermon.  Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.  Live in fragments no longer."

 -- E. M. Forster, Howard's End









"Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do belive in Art for Art's sake."

 -- E. M. Forster










"To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything."

 -- Anatole France









"The good critic is one who tells of is mind's adventures among masterpieces."

 -- Anatole France









"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality."

 -- Victor Frankel









"I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

 -- Robert Frost









"Love is an irresistable desire to be irresistably desired."

 -- Robert Frost









"Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

 -- Robert Frost









"We've got not time for art. Fuck art, let's rock. I want to be Keith Richards, I wanna play rock 'n' roll."

 -- Noel Gallagher of Oasis










"To love one who also loves you, to admire one who admires you, in a word, to be the idol of one's idol is exceeding the limit of human joy, it is stealing fire from heaven."

 -- Madame de Gerardio










Faint heart never won fair lady!

Nothing venture, nothing win

Blood is thick, but water's thin

In for a penny, in for a pound

It's Love that makes the world go 'round!

 -- Sir William Schwenk Gilbert, "Iolanthe"









"Create, artist!  Do not talk!"

 -- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe









"I call architecture frozen music."

 -- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe









"We all enter this world in the same way:  naked, screaming, and soaked in blood.  But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn't have to stop there."

 -- Dana Gould









"Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.  Art is the accomplice of love.  Take love away and there is no longer art."

 -- Remy de Gourmont









"Art is either plagiarism or revolution."

 -- Paul Guaguin










"You can pretend to be serious;  you can't pretend to be witty."

 -- Sacha Guitry









"The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people."

 -- Lucille S. Harper









forsaken heaven

cursed god above

laid with the devil

bring you my love

 -- P. J. Harvey, "To Bring You My Love"









"Love is a hole in the heart."

 -- Ben Hecht









Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck,

Most vain, most generous, sternly critical,

Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist:

A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,

Much of Antony, of Hamlet most of all,

And something of the Shorter-Catechist.

 -- William Ernest Henley, "Apparition"









"You're an actor, are you? Well, all that means is:  you are irresponsible, irrational, romantic, and incapable of handling an adult emotion or a universal concept without first reducing it to something personal, material, sensational -- and probably sexual!"

 -- George Herman, A Company of Wayward Saints










"No arts, no letters -- no society."

 -- Thomas Hobbes









"Love is like pi -- natural, irrational, and very important."

 -- Lisa Hoffman









"Hypocrisy is the lubricant of society."

 -- David Hull









"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

 -- Margaret Wolfe Hungerford









"A pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain."

 -- Leigh Hunt









"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process."

 -- Henry James









If we could not laugh, we could not bear to cry.

If we could not cry, we could not bear to live.

 -- Japenese proverb









And we tried so hard

And we looked so good

And we lived our lives in black

 -- Jesus and Mary Chain, "Happy When It Rains"









"You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest."

 -- John Keats









Darkling I listen, and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme

 -- John Keats










I'd better be a poet

Or lay down dead.

 -- Jack Kerouac, "42nd Chorus"









"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."

 -- Martin Luther King, Jr.









"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

 -- Stephen King









When it is for lust we are blamed, it is love we are denied.

 -- Brian Kinsman









"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."

 -- Rudyard Kipling









The Devil whispered behind the leaves, "it's pretty, but is it Art?"

 -- Rudyard Kipling









"It's not peace I want, not mere contentment. It's boundless joy and ecstasy for me."

 -- Kugell









"Ten years before its time, a fashion is indecent; ten years after, it is hideous; but a century after, it is romantic."

 -- James Laver









"Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness.  And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition."

 -- D. H. Lawrence









And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages

on the depths of the seven seas,

and through the salt they reel with drunken delight

and in the tropics tremble they with love

and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.

 -- D. H. Lawrence









"Be it ever so decadent, there's no place like home."

 -- Tom Lehrer









"The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting."

 -- Gloria Leonard









"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."

 -- A. J. Liebling









I wanna kiss you in Paris

I wanna hold your hand in Rome

I wanna run naked in a rainstorm

Make love in train cross-country

 -- Madonna, "Justify My Love"









"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?"

 -- Christopher Marlowe









"Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit."

 -- W. Somerset Maugham









"Any clod can have the facts; having opinions is an art."

 -- Charles McCabe









"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

 -- H. L. Mencken









"Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish."

 -- Michelangelo









In search of love and music

My whole life has been

Illumination

Corruption

And diving, diving, diving, diving,

Diving down to pick up every shiny thing

 -- Joni Mitchell









"Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly."

 -- Moliere









You have a lovely singing voice,

a lovely singing voice 

and all those who sing on key, 

they stole the notion from you and me

 -- Morrisey, "Sing Your Life"








"Perhaps I'm unique because people are so dull. I'm not very good at being dull."

 -- Morrisey









The Night is young

and full of rest

I can't describe the

way she's dressed

She'll pander to some

strange requests

Anything that you suggest
Anything to please her guest

 -- Jim Morrison









"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."

 -- Vladimir Nabokov









"The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds."

 -- Jawaharial Nehru










"Without music, life would be a mistake."

 -- Friedrich Nietzsche









"Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!"

 -- Friedrich Nietzsche









"I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine.  Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me.  I want to dance.  I want drugs.  I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them.  I never look at naive faces.  I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it."

 -- Anaïs Nin, Henry and June









"It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art."

 -- Walter Pater









"Beauty is excrescence, superabundance, random ebulience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right."

 -- Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns









"Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be acheinved only through persistent exercise of real love."

 -- M. Scott Peck, M.D.









"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it."

 -- Laurence J. Peter









"Give me a museum and I'll fill it."

 -- Pablo Picasso









"Dying is an art, like everything else.  I do it exceptionally well."

 -- Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus"









"They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

 -- Edgar Allen Poe, "Eleonora"









True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

 -- Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism









Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore

(translates to)

"I lived for art, I lived for love"

 -- Giacomo Puccini, Tosca









"Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion."

 -- Kate Reid









But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end

as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking,

you overpowered their noise with harmony, and

from pure destruction arose your transfigured song.

 -- Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Sonnets to Orpheus"









"I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal."

 -- Arthur Rimbaud, "Ma Boheme, Fantaisie"









"I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.  The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement of all the senses."

 -- Arthur Rimbaud









"I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need."

 -- Rodin









"I'm a simple man. All I want is enough sleep for two normal men, enough whiskey for three, and enough women for four."

 -- Joel Rosenberg, The Warrior Lives









"Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise."

 -- Duc de La Rouchefoucauld









"He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas."

 -- John Ruskin, Modern Painters









"Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example."

 -- John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice









Our hearts are drunk with a beauty

Our eyes could never see.

 -- George W. Russell









"A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you."

 -- Francoise Sagan









"We kiss. And it feels like we have shrugged off the world."

 -- Jim Shahin









If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

 -- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night









The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus:

Let no such man be trusted.

 -- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice









"I don't know why I did it, I don't know why I enjoyed it, and I don't know why I'll do it again."

 -- Bart Simpson










I would go out tonight

But I haven't got a stitch to wear

this man said, "it's gruesome

that someone so handsome should care."

 -- the Smiths,"This Charming Man"









"Love, you mock us for your sport."

 -- Sophocles, Antiogne









"Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilized life."

 -- Herbert Spencer









"Irresponsibility isn't a sickness -- it's an art."

 -- Remington Steele









I've been looking for an original sin

One with a twist and a bit of a spin

And since I've done all the old ones 'til they've all been done in

Now I'm just looking, then I'm gone with the wind

Endlessly searching for an original sin.

 -- Jim Steinman, "Original Sin" (sung by Meatloaf)









My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun

My hunger for her explains everything I've done

 -- Sting, "Sister Moon"









What is an artist?  For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist.

 -- Tom Stoppard










I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive but I can't do you love and rhetoric without blood.  Blood is compulsory -- they're all blood you see.

 -- Tom Stoppard









"Ink drips from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry."

 -- Mark Strand









If you were queen of pleasure,

And I were king of pain,

We'd hunt down love together,

Pluck out his flying feather,

And teach his feet a measure,

And find is mouth a rein.

 -- Algernon Charles Swinburne, "A Match"









"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues."

 -- Elizabeth Taylor









"I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me."

 -- Hunter S. Thompson









"Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen."

 -- Leo Tolstoy









In the garden I was playing the tart

I kissed your lips and broke your heart

 -- U2, "Until the End of the World"









"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

 -- Paul Valery









The long sobs

Of the violins

Of autumn

Pierce my heart

With monotonous languor.

 -- Paul Verlaine, "Chanson d'Automne"










"It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue."

 -- Voltaire









"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."

 -- Simone Weil









"An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic."

 -- H. G. Wells









"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."

 -- H. G. Wells









"Love isn't an emotion or an instinct -- it's an art."

 -- Mae West









"Too much of a good thing is wonderful."

 -- Mae West









"An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises."

 -- Mae West









"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity -- the dread of doing what has been done before."

 -- Edith Wharton









animal whisperings intoxicate the night

hypnotize the desperate, slow motion light

wash away into the rain, blood, milk and sky

hollow moons illuminate, and beauty never dies

 -- White Zombie, "Blood Milk and Sky"









Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding,

No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

No more modest than immodest.

 -- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"









"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."

 -- Oscar Wilde









"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.  Books are well written, or badly written.  That is all."

 -- Oscar Wilde









"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."

 -- Oscar Wilde









"Art should never try to be popular.  The public should try to make itself artistic."

 -- Oscar Wilde









"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."

 -- Oscar Wilde









"There is one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

 -- Oscar Wilde









"A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public to him are non-existent."

 -- Oscar Wilde









"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."

 -- Oscar Wilde









"I like the word 'indolence.' It makes my laziness seem classy."

 -- Bern Williams









"Filmmaking, like sex, isn't a polite enterprise. It involves a lot of mess and the bottom line is, if somebody ain't screaming, you're not doing your job."

 -- James Woods









"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."

 -- Virginia Woolf









"The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time."

 -- William Wordsworth









"I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:  it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity."

 -- William Wordsworth









Sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood,

and felt along the heart.

 -- William Wordsworth









"Costumes are so much better than clothes.  They're like drugs, they change your personality."

 -- Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground:  My Years in the Warhol Factory









"That's the thing I loved about drag queens, life was a constant movie; no matter how ridiculously things didn't match they would sacrifice everything for the pose, and I was definitely into the pose."

 -- Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground:  My Years in the Warhol Factory









"The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization."

 -- Frank Lloyd Wright









"Every great architect is -- necessarily -- a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age."

 -- Frank Lloyd Wright









"True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best, it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented."

 -- Frank Lloyd Wright









"Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the
necessities."

 -- Frank Lloyd Wright









"Architecture is not a goal. Architecture is for life and pleasure and work and for people. The picture frame, not the picture."

 -- William Wurster









In any man who dies, there dies with him

his first snow and kiss and fight...

No people die but worlds die in them.

 -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko















My greatest thanks to Christopher Reilley for his

contribution of dozens upon dozens of brilliant quotes!









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