listener quotes

The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let's include everybody) is perilously overloaded. His attention is, to use the latest lingo,'targeted' by powerful forces† Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it.

- Saul Bellow
  Something To Remember Me By, preface.

The main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows and senses in the universe.

-John Coltrane
  Quoted in sleeve-note to the re-issue of Coltrane's Sound (originally published1961).

The moment you praise a book too highly you waken a resistance in your listener.

- Henry Valentine Miller
  The Books in My Life.