HERE ARE A FEW STATEMENTS that I fancied when I read them. I originally placed them in the sidebar on the homepage of this site but in 2022, sidebars are no longer hip. In fact, most online experts about things online suggest doing away with sidebars completely! Me, I like sidebars but I compromised with the pros by drastically reducing the length of mine.
But not wanting to simply delete the quotes that I had collected, I moved them here. They’re in no order and they certainly don’t make some kind of cohesive statement. So it goes . . .
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“[Elvis] came to the session, picked the songs, and if something in the arrangement was changed, he was the one to change it. Everything was worked out spontaneously. Nothing was really rehearsed. Consciously or unconsciously, everyone imitated him.”
– Bones Howe
“You have no idea how great he is, really you don’t. You have no comprehension, it’s absolutely impossible. I can’t tell you why he’s so great, but he is. He’s sensational.”
– Phil Spector
“I don’t think he ripped them off. I think once something has been exposed, anyone can add or take from it if they like. He was just so great, so popular, and so hot, and so anything that he played became a hit.”
– B.B. King
“He was an integrator. Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn’t let black music through. He opened the door for black music.”
– Little Richard
“Elvis was a great man and did more for civil rights than people know. To say he was a racist is an insult to us all.”
– Ernest Withers
“The only white boy that had soul—who could sing as good as any of them—was Elvis When it comes to singing, nobody had everything like Elvis. I’ll tell the world, Elvis was the greatest of all time.”
– Muhammad Ali
“The first time that I appeared on stage, I really didn’t know what all the yelling was about. I didn’t realize that my body was moving. It’s a natural thing to me. So to the manager backstage I said, ‘What’d I do?’ And he said, ‘Whatever it is, go back and do it again.’ ”
– Elvis Presley
“Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the 20th century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it’s a whole new social revolution [and] the ’60s come from it.”
– Leonard Bernstein
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble—it’s what you know that just ain’t so.”
– Mark Twain
“I have lived with several Zen masters, all of them cats.”
– Eckhart Tolle
The piece above was drawn “randomly” by a contraption explained in “Draw Abstract Art with a Random Number Generator” by Larry Cotton for the Makezine website. It has nothing to do with any of the quotes that precede it—I just like it.
