Top 35 T Bone Burnett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When the arts are eliminated, children get bored and tired of school. When the arts are included, children’s imaginations are allowed to run wild.”

— T Bone Burnett

2. “My advice for young people is that, if you want to be a musician, the thing to do is practice eight hours a day.”

— T Bone Burnett

3. “I’ve seen a study in the last year that digital sound actually induces stress in the listener.”

— T Bone Burnett

4. “I love loud music. I listen loud, and that’s part of how I’ve learned how to do this. Record softly and play back loud and a whole other thing happens.”

— T Bone Burnett

5. “You know, the thing that struck me about Civil War music was how bloody it was; it was full of hatred. There was incredible vitriol in it.”

— T Bone Burnett

6. “I’m not going to get in to an argument with anyone about the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity, and what it means for a Jewish kid to be a Christian – I’m just not interested in that argument.”

— T Bone Burnett

7. “Risk is what separates the artist from the artisan.”

— T Bone Burnett

8. “I think we in the Alpha Band, which was a strange group anyway, weren’t dealing with any of these issues. They sneaked up on us and took us over, before we know what was going on.”

— T Bone Burnett

9. “Almost everything The Beatles did was great, and it’s hard to improve on. They were our Bach. The way to get around it may be to keep it as simple as possible.”

— T Bone Burnett

10. “There’s always been an incredible amount of junk music, and junk everything. Marshall McLuhan said that a medium surrounds a previous medium, and turns the previous medium into an art form. So, what was once a junk culture, like film, television surrounded it and turned it into an art form.”

— T Bone Burnett

11. “I’m not stupid enough to want to be famous. But I would like to be able to earn a living playing music.”

— T Bone Burnett

12. “Music was the medium through which knowledge was passed from generation to generation.”

— T Bone Burnett

13. “I got out of high school, bought a recording studio and started operating it as an engineer and a producer.”

— T Bone Burnett

14. “Technology changes nothing.”

— T Bone Burnett

15. “For centuries, everything was taught through music. History was taught through music; language and mathematics were taught through music.”

— T Bone Burnett

16. “The hallmark of an artist is generosity.”

— T Bone Burnett

17. “The essence of show business is, if you see a tight-rope walker go across a tight rope, everybody claps. But, if you see him wobble, everybody gasps.”

— T Bone Burnett

18. “In other words, I’d say the whole story of Bob Dylan is one man’s search for God. The turns and the steps he takes to find God are his business. I think he went to a study group at the Vineyard, and it created a lot of excitement.”

— T Bone Burnett

19. “I don’t want to make music for people who don’t care about music.”

— T Bone Burnett

20. “At different times in my life I met God from a different point of view.”

— T Bone Burnett

21. “Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything.”

— T Bone Burnett

22. “The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea.”

— T Bone Burnett

23. “It’s also ironic that in the old days of tape and tape hiss and vinyl records and surface noise, we were always trying to get records louder and louder to overcome that.”

— T Bone Burnett

24. “If Picasso walked into Disney looking for a job, they would throw him out on the street. Couldn’t draw good enough.”

— T Bone Burnett

25. “Let the business take care of itself. If you get involved in the business, every hour that you’re involved in business is an hour that you’re not practicing. And every hour that you’re not practicing is another hour further away from where you want to be.”

— T Bone Burnett

26. “Still, records are documents of a period of time. Most records are documents of two or three years, and I just approached it as a record I was doing over a 20-year period of time.”

— T Bone Burnett

27. “I naturally wanted to be saved, so when I came home I told my mom I wanted to be confirmed. That’s the way I related to it, being raised an Episcopalian. I went to Dallas and got confirmed.”

— T Bone Burnett

28. “We live in an age lit by lightnin’; after the flash, we’re blind again.”

— T Bone Burnett

29. “Probably the deepest use of music and of art is to create conscience.”

— T Bone Burnett

30. “The record business is dangerous to the health of bands and individuals, which is something I’m just now learning. But it’s not dangerous in any of the ways people think; it’s not that they try to make you compromise your art. That’s not the problem.”

— T Bone Burnett

31. “People make art on the sides of buildings, and they’ll make art on the sides of trains. They’ll make art wherever they decide to make art. The technology that people are working with now will be replaced in 10 years, so that’s not where your future is, if you’re a musician.”

— T Bone Burnett

32. “My original idea was to produce and not make records myself.”

— T Bone Burnett

33. “I don’t hear any of the popular stuff unless it’s good ’cause I pay no attention to popular culture, at all.”

— T Bone Burnett

34. “If it is true that we have a personal relationship with God, then that’s enough for me.”

— T Bone Burnett

35. “I want to write songs and play them for people – live.”

— T Bone Burnett

36. “Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.”

— T Bone Burnett

37. “The internet has surrounded television and turned television into an art form.”

— T Bone Burnett

38. “I figured out early on what I wanted to do.”

— T Bone Burnett

39. “I can tell for sure, the technologists have made it clear that they don’t care about musicians. The arts have been sacrificed on the altar of technological advancement.”

— T Bone Burnett