Top 35 Elvis Costello Quotes

I believe that music is connected by human passions and curiosities rather than by marketing strategies.

I think when I was younger I was not very good at writing love songs that didn’t have a twist.

‘Content’ is a word that has never sat well with me. Like ‘maturity’. They are two words I’ve never liked. I think they imply some sort of decay. A settling.

These are the sort of things that push you on in music – the curiosity, a passion for new ideas.

Obviously the people that I admired, like the Beatles, were really into rock’n’roll, but it was already a little past rock’n’roll when I started listening and making my own choices about music.

I found with this record I had to really be strong-willed, because in the past I’ve tended to tinker and add a thing or take a thing away, and nearly always been wrong.

Well, I’ve had a lot of different experiences in music over the years. And not everything you do can satisfy everybody’s idealised version of you.

I’d been to Memphis before, but we stayed out of Memphis early on in the late 70s for obvious reasons. People were very sensitive about Elvis Presley, and my stage name obviously would be provocative to some people in that area at that time.

It’s a petty thing, but I wouldn’t join the Scouts when I was a kid, ’cause you had to swear allegiance to the queen. I’m just not a royalist. I think it’s idiotic, a hereditary principle.

Living a very long time would be a very scary thing.

Maybe I just never learned my harmony part, because what everybody says sounds odd to them sounds perfectly natural to me.

I’ve worked hard, every single day since I left school. I think I have a Protestant work ethic.

You need a platform upon which to release an orchestral record, otherwise it’s just going to be an obscurity.

Obviously I got known for some other songs early on, and some of those were rock’n’roll songs. Some of them were melodic pop songs. And I’ve done lots of different things, as you know, but every so often I get drawn back.

I find humming is very useful.

I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused.

People become so deeply attached to the sound of one period that they blow a fuse when you move on. I’ve heard people complain bitterly about recordings they haven’t even heard.

And I don’t feel any form of music is beyond me in the sense of that I don’t understand it or I don’t have some love for some part of it.

There was not a lot of rock n’ roll in the house. Our parents didn’t think it was very groovy, and I tend to agree with them. If you grew up with Charlie Parker, Bill Haley wasn’t very hip.

I get very frustrated by this term ‘genre exercise.’ I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don’t agree that any of my albums are genre exercises.

I’ve always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That’s true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.

It’s what I do. I don’t deserve any awards for this, it’s just music. It’s just writing songs. You sit down, you write a song, you record it. You tour and play the songs live, dress them up a bit differently, or dress them down.

I find it to be the ultimate backhanded compliment when you are compared against yourself.

Smokey Robinson writes the heartfelt songs, whereas it was my job to write the songs about weakness and failure in love.

I’m a working travelling musician, but just on a bigger scale.

But there are things in Il Sogno that the methods of The Delivery Man could never achieve.

I’ve never felt British. I’m just not interested in national identity. I don’t know why.

There’s no such thing as an original sin.

There are many critics who have an idealised version of where my strengths lie.

The Internet is overrated. It’s much smaller an innovation than people think it is. I don’t think it’s changed the way anybody makes music.

Happiness isn’t a fortune in a cookie. It’s deeper, wider, funnier, and more transporting than that.

Very similar experience happened last year when we released this album, North. It was on Deutsche Grammophon, it was very, very honest. It was the most honest record I’ve ever written.

You have to face the fact that I have no reputation as a composer; I have my reputation as a songwriter and a performer-and that opportunity came this summer, when I was invited to perform at the Lincoln Centre festival in New York… three nights.

Sometimes I write notes that I have difficulty singing.

And obviously, when I started out, I had a little bit more curiosity than some, and went seeking out the original artists, or in some cases searching up country music.