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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

John Zorn Quotes

Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don’t want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance.

– John Zorn

People sometimes have a very hard time accepting change.

– John Zorn

Like you have seven people with their hands up. I gotta make a choice. Y’know, that’s tough. Sometimes I gotta go with someone that has an idea and make several calls in a row, because they got an idea.

– John Zorn

I don’t play favorites with people. My basic philosophy is that the only way to make the world a better place is by bringing something beautiful to every single person you run into at every moment of the day, so how can you play favorites with somebody?

– John Zorn

I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it’s not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out.

– John Zorn

And I try to be as diplomatic as I can, but it always ends up being a psychodrama up there on stage.

– John Zorn

I’m constantly tortured, and that’s why I say happiness is irrelevant. Happiness is for children and yuppies.

– John Zorn

If someone is a straight jazzhead, or a straight metalhead, or straight classical, they have a very narrow range of what they allow into their lives. But the people who listen to what we put out into the world have to be open-minded. Because we’re so pluralist.

– John Zorn

I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages.

– John Zorn

It’s a blast to watch. It’s a lot more interesting live than it is on record. I mean, it really is a theatrical event. It’s a sporting event! Cause you never know what’s gonna happen.

– John Zorn

For about seven years. I really like it there. There are a lot of great musicians. The scene is very open. A lot of stuff going on. People’s ears are really open, they are not closed. A lot of scenes here, people just get tunnel vision and are into one thing.

– John Zorn

When I’m writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I’m trying not to get in the way.

– John Zorn

I don’t ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn’t work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who’s playing.

– John Zorn

As soon as you get a certain amount of attention, then everybody kinda wants to start taking pot shots at you. All your old friends that supported you don’t support you any more.

– John Zorn

What happens when you get to the age of 60 is that you have no more doubts. I know why I’m here on this planet. I know what I need to do. I know what is a distraction and what isn’t.

– John Zorn

Well, in Japan, I have got a group of musicians that I have worked with a lot, that concentrate just on the hardcore stuff, say, that Naked City has been working on. We have like a repertoire of sixty songs now.

– John Zorn

You know, when we were kids, we had to go to a theater to see a movie. And then television came in and you had to wait until midnight to see the one you wanted to see. Now, all you’ve got to do is go to a store and buy it and you can watch it whenever you want!

– John Zorn

You can’t be idealistic in this world and not be crazy.

– John Zorn

I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way.

– John Zorn

The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive.

– John Zorn

No one sits in front of a drum set and thinks they invented it all out of whole cloth. The fact that the set is there means that you’ve got some dues to pay to Baby Dodds.

– John Zorn

I don’t control it at all. It’s all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are.

– John Zorn

That is a lot of the reason I do what I do, to really spread the word and spread information and turn people onto different things they may not be, y’know, aware of. That is what Naked City is certainly about.

– John Zorn

My solo music – I get up onstage, I improvise and it’s my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we’re improvising together. Then it’s not my music; it’s our music.

– John Zorn

It breaks even. We lose ten, twenty grand every year. But then the people who are working say, Look, I’ll kick this back in, I don’t need to take this profit share. It’s very cooperative.

– John Zorn

Great musicians accept everything that they hear and find something good. They take what they like and they throw away what they don’t like.

– John Zorn