in Quotes & Aphorisms (Celebrities)
The Beatles were so big that it's hard for people not alive at the time to realize just how big they were. There isn't a real comparison with anyone now.
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The Beatles were so big that it's hard for people not alive at the time to realize just how big they were. There isn't a real comparison with anyone now.
I think you're always prepared to listen to people's points of view, but when they're not working you've got to speak up as well. I think social comment is very much part of what the Rolling Stones have always done.
We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship. We were part of it and contributed what we contributed. I can't designate what we did and didn't do. It depends on how each individual was impressed by the Beatles or how our shock wave went to different people. We were going through the changes, and all we were saying was, it's raining up here, or there's land or there's a sun or we can see a seagull. We were just reporting what was happening to us.
One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that's what I resent. I mean I did it, I didn't know, I didn't foresee; it just happened, bit by bit, gradually, until this complete craziness is surrounding you and you're doing exactly what you don't want to do with people you can't stand, the people you hated when you were ten. And that's what I'm saying with this album, I remember what it's all about now, you fuckers: fuck you! That's what I'm saying, you don't get me twice.
Their forms had no more influence on me than they did on Matisse. Or Derain. But for them, the masks were sculptures like all others. When Matisse showed me his first African head, he spoke to me of Egyptian art.
I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo, that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, great in every thing he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast, for luncheon, for dinner, for tea, for supper, for between meals. I like a change, occasionally.
The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.
Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches, he has made music sick.
In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny Von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over.
Dear Sallie: I am very sorry you have a cold and you are in bed. I played with Mary today for a little while. I hope by tomorrow you will be able to be up. I am glad today [sic] that my cold is better. Your loving, Franklin d. Roosevelt.