Music, they say is like a food to the soul. While some may think otherwise about this statement, one can be quick to ask, what’s better than music? And you’re absolutely correct – nothing! However, humor comes a close second as it helps people in so many ways, particularly laughter helps to reduce stress and also improve one’s health. There are several funny sayings and quotes about music or musicians which can help inspire laughter. Whether you are a music lover or a music star yourself, check out these 100 funny sayings and quotes about music from your favourite music stars and composers. These quotes about music are guaranteed to get your rips cracking, so if you have a glass of wine you might consider dropping it to avoid laughing through your nose. Enjoy!
100 Funny Sayings and Quotes About Music or Musicians
1. “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” — Bob Marley
2. “I once sent him a song and asked him to mark a cross wherever he thought it was faulty. Brahms returned it untouched, saying ‘I don’t want to make a cemetery of your compositions.” — Hugo Wolf
3. “If I didn’t do this well, I just wouldn’t have anything to do…I can’t cook, and I’d be a terrible housewife.” ― Freddie Mercury (Queen)
4. “When people say you’re doing something radical in rock or dance music, I’m not sure how special that is. What we do is so old-fashioned. It’s like trying to do something innovative in tap-dancing.” ― Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead)
5. “Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk in order to provide articles for people who can’t read.” ― Frank Zappa
6. “I think John would have liked Free As A Bird. In fact, I hope somebody does this to all my crap demos when I’m dead, making them into hit songs.” — George Harrison
7. “Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays.” —Oscar Wilde
8. “There’s nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn’t exist before – I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.” ― Paul McCartney
9. “I don’t deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn’t deserve that, either. So I’ll keep it!” ― Quincy Jones
10. “I’ve been imitated so well I’ve heard people copy my mistakes.” ― Jimi Hendrix
11. “There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between.” — Thomas Beecham
12. “Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?” — John Cusack
13. “Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.” — Bill Cosby
14. “Actually I don’t remember being born, it must have happened during one of my blackouts.” ― Jim Morrison
15. “I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.” ― Duke Ellington
16. “I can destroy a dance floor, I think life should be a musical. I always hate it when people watch a musical and they go, ‘Oh, it’s so unrealistic, no one just breaks into song in the middle of their day.’ Yeah, they do- if they’re me.” — Zachery Levi
17. “Get up from that piano. You hurtin’ its feelings.” — Jelly Roll Morton
18. “I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” ― Tom Waits
19. “Music is the only thing in this world, with the exception of sneezing and looking at the sunset, that takes you to a place that’s above the mundane. Everything else is just bullshit.” ― Stephan Jenkins
20. “When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time. ” ― Lady Gaga
21. “When I was a little boy, I told my dad, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a musician.’ My dad said: ‘You can’t do both, Son.” ― Chet Atkins
22. “If music be the food of love, play on.” ― William Shakespeare
23. “I smash guitars because I like them.” — Pete Townshend
24. “Let me be clear about this: I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem.”
― Keith Richards
25. I never practice my guitar… from time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.” ― Wes Montgomery
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Best Funny Quotes About Music or Musicians
26. “To me, a guitar is kind of like a woman. You don’t know why you like ’em but you do.” ― Waylon Jennings
27. “The piano has been drinking, not me.” — Tom Waits
28. “If I knew I had to play this song the rest of my life I probably woulda wrote something else….” ― Joe Walsh (“Rocky Mountain Way”)
29. “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
30. “Dogs smoke in France.” ― Ozzy Osbourne
31. “To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?” ― Michael Jackson
32. “Everything in me feels fluttering and free like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.” ― Lauren Oliver
33. “Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays.” —Oscar Wilde
34. “Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.” — John Philip Sousa
35. “After I saw Jimmy [Hendrix] play, I just went home and wondered what the f*** I was going to do with my life.” ― Jeff Beck
36. “Sometimes we pee on each other before we go on stage.” — Trent Reznor
37. “It’s easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.” — Johann Sebastian Bach
38. “I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.” — Duke Ellington
39. “People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It’s like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.” ― Michael Jackson
40. “To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.” — Igor Stravinsky
41. “If you’re listening to a rock star to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are.” ― Alice Cooper
42. “Music is a proud, temperamental mistress. Give her the time and attention she deserves, and she is yours. Slight her and there will come a day when you call and she will not answer. So I began sleeping less to give her the time she needed.” ― Patrick Rothfuss
43. “I can’t listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.” — Woody Allen
44. “Rock ‘n’ roll will never die. There’ll always be some arrogant little brat who wants to make music with a guitar.” — Dave Edmunds
45. “Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.” — William F. Buckley, Jr.
46. “Paul Ryan’s love for Rage Against The Machine is amusing because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades.” — Tom Morello
47. “If the King loves music, it is well with the land.” — Mencius
48. “People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has.” — Taylor Swift
49. “Music is the medicine of the breaking heart.” — Leigh Hunt
50. “My music is best understood by children and animals.” — Igor Stravinsky
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51. “I’m just a musical prostitute, my dear.” ― Freddie Mercury
52. “Competitions are for horses, not artists.” ― Bela Bartok
53. “Yeah, after making Pablo Honey, we started experimenting with cloning myself in order to double the band’s creative energy. However, the experiment was a failure, and the defective Thom Yorke clone escaped. And formed a band called Muse.” ― Thom Yorke
54. “I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.” ― Martin Luther
55. “People never ask people doing serious music, ‘Do you ever think about doing funny music?’” ― Al Yankovic
56. “A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.” ― Ernest Newman
57. “Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music is everywhere, but so is AIDS.” — Malcolm Williamson
58. “To get your playing more forceful, hit the drums harder.” ― Keith Moon (The Who)
59. “All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.” ― Louis Armstrong
60. “Actually I don’t remember being born, it must have happened during one of my black outs.” ― Jimmy Morrison
61. “If a man whistles at you, do not respond. You are a lady, not a dog.” ― Adele
62. “In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.” ― Robert Schumann
63. “I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down.”— Bob Newhart
64. “Last night at Carnegie Hall, Jack Benny played Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn lost.” — Harold C. Schonberg
65. “Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.” — John Ruskin
66. “My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer.” — Cole Porter
67. “Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.” — Robert Green Ingersoll
68. “Somebody just gave me a shower radio. Thanks a lot. Do you really want music in the shower? I guess there’s no better place to dance than a slick surface next to a glass door.” — Jerry Seinfeld
69. “All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.” ― Frank Zappa
70. “Patrick actually used to be popular before Sam bought him some good music.” ― Stephen Chbosky
71. “I’ve outdone anyone you can name – Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.” ― James Brown
72. “If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance and then doesn’t have to go to an osteopath, then there’s something wrong.” ― Simon Rattle
73. “Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.” ― Paul Whiteman
74. “Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
75. “Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.” — Kin Hubbard
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76. “Lesser artists borrow, great artists, steal.” — Igor Stravinsky
77. “Music was my refuge. I could crawl into space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” — Maya Angelou
78. “The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.” — Leonard Bernstein
79. “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.” — Victor Hugo
80. “Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.” — Ludwig van Beethoven
81. “To the U.S. and the world, I’m just known as some funny song and some funny music, some funny video guy. But in Korea I’m doing one of the biggest concerts; it’s not a dance music concert. I’m playing with the band, so I change my every song to a rock song.” — PSY
82. “Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.” — Thomas Fuller
83. “Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can’t.” — Johnny Depp
84. “Music is well said to be the speech of angels.” — Thomas Carlyle
85. “No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.” — Kurt Vonnegut
86. “Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.” — Lao Tzu
87. “Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of a woman.” — Ludwig van Beethoven
88. “Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.” — Johann Sebastian Bach
89. “Music is powerful. As people listen to it, they can be affected. They respond.” — Ray Charles
90. “You can cage the singer but not the song.” — Harry Belafonte
91. “Where words leave off, music begins.” — Heinrich Heine
92. “Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?” — Michael Torke
93. “If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music, I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.” — Albert Einstein
94. “Music is the emotional life of most people.” — Leonard Cohen
95. “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
96. “Music and silence combine strongly because music is done in silence and silence is full of music.” — Marcel Marceau
97. “Some songs can wait for years and then – boom! and explode like a bomb.” — Verka Serduchka
98. “Music played a large role in the survival of the black people in America – that and a sense of humor that couldn’t be enslaved.” — Redd Foxx
99. “I’ve found that no matter what life throws at me, music softens the blow.” — Bryce Anderson
100. “A great song should lift your heart, warm the soul and make you feel good.” — Colbie Caillat