Robert Fripp

Understanding is simple. Knowing is complicated.

If the audience doesn’t hear what is going on, is it going on?

What we hear is the quality of our listening.

You must own it to play it.

Something just grabs you about a song.

Even now, at 82 years old, if I don’t learn something every day, you know what I think? It’s a day lost. Now, I don’t practice every day. I just take the guitar, swear at it. But I should be swearing at myself. But I fool with music. I’m doing something musically all the time. And my ears are wide open for anything I can hear.

I could see the blues was about survival.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition.

Those who wish to sing, always find a song.

People love us when we play what we want to play but we’re starving.

We don’t talk music. We just play.

For me, music and life are all about style

Jazz music is collective creativity.

My improvisations are a beguiling mixture of the vertical and the horizontal.

I’m a musician at heart, I know I’m not really a singer. I couldn’t compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.

A Jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

It’s true I’ve always been attracted to the jazz band in an orchestral way, rather than a band way.

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it’s the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what’s available, what somebody happens to play for you.