Artists Aren't Really People: Music-Related Quotes

Here are my favorite lyrics and quotes by or about musicians.

"A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast 'n' bulbous, got me?"
--Captain Beefheart, "Pachuco Cadaver" (1969)

"[Serge] Gainsbourg has been cursed by an attribute which has proved a more powerful hindrance to rock stardom that being blind, tone-deaf or dead: that most fatal of adjectives, French."
--Robert Chalmers, The Independent

"And if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us, to die by your side, well, the pleasure--the privilege--is mine!"
--The Smiths, "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" (1986)

[While studying in London in 1986, I had "the pleasure--the privilege" of seeing the Smiths at the Brixton Academy.]

"Artists aren't really people. And I'm actually 40% papier maché."
--Morrissey (the Smiths)

''She saw so far into the future that she could afford to take 10 years off and not say another word.''
--Sandra Bernhard on Patti Smith, Without You I'm Nothing (1989)

"Garrett and McManus would be perfect for an Aki Kaurismäki buddy road movie about a couple of nuns turned rockers."
--Howard Hampton on Mr. Airplane Man (2004)

"I was eating...lots of sugar and carbs."
--Avril Lavigne, on the cause of her former angst (2004)

"This shorty has more cheek than Dizzy Gillespie, never mind Dizzee Rascal."
--Robert Christgau on Lady Sovereign (2005)

Endnote: For a list of my favorite quotes, click here. Click here for movie quotes. Image: Don Van Vliet in 1980 - photo by Anton Corbijn.