Carly Simon

I always live in some kind of anticipation of something good happening.

I sought some kind of freedom in music, in the promise of transcendence and the idea that the purity and the innocence of a mythical god could somehow deliver me from darkness.

One of the things about creativity is you can be in denial about these things. When I found out I had cancer, there were four hours in which I was pounding my head on the marble kitchen top saying, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.” But then I felt as if this little army in uniform was flooding me. They had come to help me fight it. I felt really strong about it after that. It was one of the strongest periods of my life.

I’m constantly reemerging in my life.

I’ve sworn never to read any reviews ever again except those that are pointed out to me as nice ones. I would say that most of us who are considered in the artist realm just take it so terribly, and, you know, it can kill ya!

When I was a little girl, I so wanted to be sociable, but I was scared that I wasn’t going to be able to speak a sentence because I had such a bad stammer.

Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.

It is better to be felt than to be heard.

First of all, I never strive for identity. That’s something that just has happened automatically as a result, I think, of just putting things together, tearing things apart and putting it together my own way, and somehow I guess the individual comes through eventually.

I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.

The spirit of Jazz is the spirit of openness.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

Your humanity is your instrument.

The time is now.

I’d like to feel that whatever I play is a result of whatever I’ve heard.

I’m too busy playing. When I’m playing I don’t pay attention to who’s listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don’t listen to one instrument; you listen to music.

Don’t worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

Jazz music is collective creativity.

When rock music came in, I wasn’t bitter about it. I was puzzled.

I think the one thing that I’ve learned is that you cannot predict what’s going to happen. You can’t sit back and try to figure out what people want or leave it up to them to decide. When we all started in this business we would dictate to the audience what was great and they picked up on that based on the fact that we believed that it was great. But that’s all changed. What’s happened in the last ten years or so because is that the technology now means that everyone with a computer can make music and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.