David Gilmour Quotes

It's not true that you fall in love only once in your life. But it is true that you only fall in love a certain way, with a certain absoluteness, once.

Make life an art rather than art from life.

You know, once you've had that guitar up so loud on the stage, where you can lean back and volume will stop you from falling backward, that's a hard drug to kick.

Jimi Hendrix isn't as good as me!

Our music has depth, and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discussions of infinity, eternity and mortality. There is a line which people cross that turns it into some magical, mystical realm, for which I dont claim responsibility and dont hold any great truck with.

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today And then one day you find, ten years has got behind you No one told you where to run, you missed the starting gun.

Obviously, they're all a gang of idiots. But, you know... live and let live.

I think I could walk into any music shop anywhere and with a guitar off the rack, a couple of basic pedals and an amp I could sound just like me. There's no devices, customized or otherwise, that give me my sound.

I mean, I have moments of huge frustration because of my inability to express myself linguistically as clearly as I would like to.

I've been in The Who, I've been in The Beatles and I've been in Pink Floyd! Top that!

My technique is laughable at times. I have developed a style of my own, I suppose, which creeps around. I don't have to have too much technique for it. I've developed the parts of my technique that are useful to me. I'll never be a very fast guitar player. I don't really know what to say about my style. There's always a melodic intent in there.

The future is deterministic in principle, but not in practice.

It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.

I’m not interested in teaching books by women.

Pompeii is an extraordinary place to be because it was preserved exactly as it was. There are many other sites. If you visit any other antiquity-type sites throughout the world, they're very damaged with what's gone on over the centuries since they were abandoned. But this one was just, like, sealed, so you're looking at rock surfaces and the carving of letters and names in the stones looks like it was done yesterday.

The only way artists can do things is to do it for themselves. Trying to second guess what the public wants or likes is kind of a fool's game.

I haven't watched it [the film 'Pink Floyd at Pompeii'] in years. I find it excruciating.

The music tends to be an expression of one's darker moments.

The idea of going around to somebody else's flat or house and sitting around in a comfy room and having a really good hi-fi system and listening to a whole album all the way through, then chatting for a few minutes, then maybe putting another album on . . . does that happen today?

There is irreducible chance in the universe.

How much in life is determined, and how much is due to chance?

Don't bait your breath. That's bad for your health.

When I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women.

God created a system which gave us freewill.

These days I don't look to other people with the objective of trying to steal their licks, although I've got no objections to stealing them if that seems like a good idea. I'm sure that I'm still influenced by Mark Knopfler and Eddie Van Halen as well......I can't play like Eddie Van Halen. I wish I could. I sat down to try some of those ideas and can't do it. I don't know if I could ever get any of that stuff together. Sometimes I think I should work at the guitar more.

Where would rock and roll be without feedback?

We already had all the songs, and it turns out all you have to do is burn them to some CDs, so why not?

Subconsciously you just pick up things into your sort of musical vocabulary and use them.

Everything in moderation - that's what I live by.

I tend to jot down music.

Adrian Maben came to us with the idea. And we just thought, "Well, why not?" I don't think any of us thought it would be as well received and last in people's minds for as long as it did. All credit to him. It's his idea [Pink Floyd at Pompeii] and it was great.

It's a very tempting thing to try and relive your glory days when you get a little older and you worry that people have forgotten all about you.

I don't like to get too specific about lyrics. It places limitations on them, and spoils the listeners' interpretation.

No one can replace Richard Wright. He was my musical partner and my friend.

It's not whether God plays dice; it's how God plays dice.

I think myself that, rather like books, music is meant to enter into the brain, well via your ears rather than your eyes but, it's - I think a lot more should be left to the imagination.

That’s the great illusion of travel, of course, the notion that there’s somewhere to get to. A place where you can finally say, Ah, I’ve arrived. (Of course there is no such place. There’s only a succession of waitings until you go home.)

I am in a space now where I can try anything; and with Pink Floyd we've always been in a space where we were able to try out anything. I think we were very young then and we were very keen to experiment and try things out. It seems to me that this sort of experimenting is like working yourself towards something and trying to find what you like and what you want.

I went to a school in Cambridge, which I thought was completely rotten. Yes, hated it. Now they want me to go back there and support this, that, and the other and I haven't managed to pluck up the courage to even face it yet.

I just play intuitively and work the same way in the studio. I don't have any magical effects or anything that helps me to get my particular sound.

I tend to fly old airplanes and old sort of things that are nearly about as old as me. Biplanes and stuff like that.

I've never had any religion. I'd prefer it if I did, really. Even as a boy I just couldn't make myself believe.

I don't have a very disciplined approach to practicing or anything, but I do tend to have a guitar around most of the time, which I strum on most of the day.

I'm an atheist, and I don't have any belief in an afterlife.

I am not a technophobe and I am using the latest technology today, some 30-odd years later, and I am really enjoying what some of the new technologies can offer. But at the same time I am always aware that one can get bogged down in that technology and that it can become more than just a method. That's something that you have to be slightly careful of.

Being a solo artist is what I do. It's what I've been doing for the last 20 years and a bit before then.

The internet seems to be what a lot of independent bands are doing these days. They're bypassing the studio - the big studios, EMI and all the record companies - and just doing it themselves, online, selling their stuff, getting known through that medium.

I actually learned the guitar with the help of a Pete Seeger instructional record when I was 13 or 14.

Usually, in the studio, on this sort of thing... you just go out and have a play over it, and see what comes, and it's usually - mostly - the first take that's the best one, and you find yourself repeating yourself thereafter.

I think once you've seen a song with a video, it limits your own mind's ability to read into it anything other than what you've seen.