Top 150 Elvis Costello Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “And I don’t feel any form of music is beyond me in the sense of that I don’t understand it or I don’t have some love for some part of it.”

— Elvis Costello

102. “In the tiny torn up pieces of his mind he’s irresistible too.”

— Elvis Costello

103. “Serious music usually doesn’t pay.”

— Elvis Costello

104. “Sometimes I write notes that I have difficulty singing. And you start talking yourself out of the bold melody and start wanting to arrange it in another key or something. Maybe I just never learned my harmony part, because what everybody says sounds odd to them sounds perfectly natural to me.”

— Elvis Costello

105. “No use wishing now for any other sin.”

— Elvis Costello

106. “You must hold on to the sort of finger-painting aspect of music. That’s something I learned, particularly from listening to Neil Young. Tom Waits is another one, because Tom’s music is incredibly sophisticated and beautifully arranged, but he’s using a toolbox that’s unlike anybody else’s.”

— Elvis Costello

107. “I don’t think I was ever particularly mean. I can certainly think of some idiotic exchanges I’ve had. I was accused of destroying pop music, like Wagner destroyed opera – a guy in Germany started ranting that at me.”

— Elvis Costello

108. “Anything that has to travel all the way down from your cerebellum to your fingertips, there’s a lot of things that can happen on the journey. Sometimes I’ll listen to records, my own stuff, and I think god, the original idea for this was so much better than the mutation that we arrived at.”

— Elvis Costello

109. “I really thought twice about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when that came in. I always was of a mind that it’s an inherently stupid idea to put something like that in a glass case.”

— Elvis Costello

110. “Now I just don’t know who to tell to go to hell Who put the old devil in the distorted angel?”

— Elvis Costello

111. “Then I became an altar boy because of the solemn face, but I got thrown out at fourteen for laughing, because the priest used to mumble everything except the church plate takings.”

— Elvis Costello

112. “I’m not even sure what I want, but that’s not the point – it’s that I want it now.”

— Elvis Costello

113. “Elvis Presley and Puccini shall return.”

— Elvis Costello

114. “It’s a petty thing, but I wouldn’t join the Scouts when I was a kid, ’cause you had to swear allegiance to the queen. I’m just not a royalist. I think it’s idiotic, a hereditary principle.”

— Elvis Costello

115. “I get very frustrated by this term ‘genre exercise.’ I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don’t agree that any of my albums are genre exercises.”

— Elvis Costello

116. “The theme of exile is attractive to me, because it’s sort of like the family business. Not just music, but travel.”

— Elvis Costello

117. “I’ve never had any real concern about posterity. I hope some people will be sorry when I’m not here, but I’m not playing for that.”

— Elvis Costello

118. “I’ve had an unusual life. A life far removed from most people’s experience.”

— Elvis Costello

119. “You do have to be a bit careful with your voice. It is an instrument.”

— Elvis Costello

120. “I believe that music is connected by human passions and curiosities rather than by marketing strategies.”

— Elvis Costello

121. “Living a very long time would be a very scary thing.”

— Elvis Costello

122. “History repeats the old conceits.”

— Elvis Costello

123. “These are the sort of things that push you on in music – the curiosity, a passion for new ideas.”

— Elvis Costello

124. “Really the only thing holding a lot of records together is the personality of the singer, and the will to write all of these different things.”

— Elvis Costello

125. “You can’t live in the past, and I don’t. I’m not nostalgic about my own work at all.”

— Elvis Costello

126. “I’ve been lucky to listen to lots of different types of music.”

— Elvis Costello

127. “Maybe I just never learned my harmony part, because what everybody says sounds odd to them sounds perfectly natural to me.”

— Elvis Costello

128. “People become so deeply attached to the sound of one period that they blow a fuse when you move on. I’ve heard people complain bitterly about recordings they haven’t even heard.”

— Elvis Costello

129. “There are a lot of things that you can like at a distance without spending a huge amount of time pondering. It’s not so complicated.”

— Elvis Costello

130. “It’s what’s on the record not what labels on it. You know, that’s like getting a box of cornflakes and eating the cardboard.”

— Elvis Costello

131. “I’m drawing from two generations back how to think about music, how to think about why you travel to make music, what the possible pitfalls of that are for the way your life is structured. The good and bad of all of it get into the mix of what’s created, what you’re creating.”

— Elvis Costello

132. “I’m a working travelling musician, but just on a bigger scale.”

— Elvis Costello

133. “I think when I was younger I was not very good at writing love songs that didn’t have a twist.”

— Elvis Costello

134. “I mistrust these people in music industry who can be everybody. This is where technology dictates to them. I mistrust that, that in somehow the chips capture the soul of a player, that’s patent nonsense.”

— Elvis Costello

135. “There is music that seems to belong to you the moment that you hear it, and music about which you must be patient, awaiting the hour when it may reveal itself to you.”

— Elvis Costello

136. “Obviously I got known for some other songs early on, and some of those were rock’n’roll songs. Some of them were melodic pop songs. And I’ve done lots of different things, as you know, but every so often I get drawn back.”

— Elvis Costello

137. “People speak with enormous pomposity and arrogance about music.”

— Elvis Costello

138. “I think records started getting better again because everyone was dropping that tedious pose that there was no past. You could hear that The Clash were raiding their record collections for anything that they could turn into new songs.”

— Elvis Costello

139. “My dad had a steady job with a really major dance band from ’54 till ’68, and then quit because he wanted to play different music. He wanted to sing about peace. He believed in these things.”

— Elvis Costello

140. “It’s not crazy to want to have certain songs be developed harmonically and still want to make noise with the guitar. And you can have both.”

— Elvis Costello

141. “I can write orchestrations, but I can’t sight-read music and play at the same time. I don’t have enough facility.”

— Elvis Costello

142. “Some people can’t physically hear things. A kid that listens to Metallica or something can’t hear that, because he’s filled himself up with this stuff, he physically can’t hear a banjo or a harp or something.”

— Elvis Costello

143. “Well, T Bone’s had a remarkable career as a producer since the time that we first worked together. He was dividing his time between recording and producing when we first met, and touring. We toured together and we were great friends.”

— Elvis Costello

144. “And obviously, when I started out, I had a little bit more curiosity than some, and went seeking out the original artists, or in some cases searching up country music.”

— Elvis Costello

145. “I’ve always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That’s true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.”

— Elvis Costello

146. “And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.”

— Elvis Costello

147. “Cook was then very handsome in a fey English way and dressed in floor-length, striped djellaba. In the role of the dead-eyed Spiggott, he intoned lines like “You fill me with inertia,” while appearing utterly indifferent to the beauties who danced in attendance. It was a scene that might have provided the basic blueprint for what would later become the Pet Shop Boys’ career.”

— Elvis Costello

148. “I know that when I make a record like The Delivery Man as a contrast to even Il Sogno, this is going to reach a wider audience, because it communicates in that very direct way.”

— Elvis Costello

149. “You need a platform upon which to release an orchestral record, otherwise it’s just going to be an obscurity.”

— Elvis Costello

150. “I find humming is very useful.”

— Elvis Costello