"The ticks turn into tocks, and the tocks turn into ticks" - Derek Bailey when asked "What happens to time-awareness during improvisation?".

"People ask me, ‘what was the best year for the music?’ I always say, this year is the best year for music. Prior to that it was the previous year"
John Peel

“All I ever wanted to do was make a record. Here's what you do: you pick up your guitar, you rip a few people's tunes off, you swap them round a bit, get your brother in the band, punch his head in every now and again, and it sells. I'm a lucky bastard. I'm probably the single most lucky man in the world - apart from our Liam."
Noel Gallagher

"When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy."
-- Ludwig van Beethoven

about art, but music is art.

"Art is not the application of a canon of
beauty but what the instinct and the
brain can conceive beyond any canon.
When we love a woman we
don't start measuring her limbs."
--Pablo Picasso

The first two lines, which rhymed 'kiddin' you' and 'didn't you,' just about knocked me out, and later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse, the diplomats, and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much.
Bob Dylan discussing the song "Like a Rolling Stone" in Rolling Stone magazine (1988)

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent” - Victor Hugo

“Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.” - E. Y. Harburg

“Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

..and the list goes on and on...

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/is...0312278675.jpg I just found this quote about music in this book that's taking me forever to read, and it made me glad that I stuck with it. It's a little long-winded, so bare with me. It takes place between the protagonist/narrator and a jazz musician, who he meets through his endless wanderings around his city. Whenever he asks him his opinions about music, the saxophonist usually just smiles and dismisses it, until the time he demands an answer from him:

"Well," he said with equanimity, "you see, in my opinion, there is no point at all in talking about music. I never talk about music. What reply, then, was I to make to your very able and just remarks? You were perfectly right in all you said. But, you see, I am a musician, not a professor, and I don't believe that, as regards music, there is the least point in being right. Music does not depend on being right, on having good taste and education and all that."
"Indeed. Then what does it depend on?"
"On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable. That is the point, Monsieur. Though I carried the complete works of Bach and Haydn in my head and could say the cleverest things about them, not a soul would be the better for it. But when I take hold of my mouthpiece and play a lively shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will give people pleasure. It gets into their legs and into their blood. That's the point and that alone. Look at the faces in a dance hall at the moment when the music strikes up after a longish pause, how the eyes sparkle, legs twitch and faces begin to laugh. That is why one makes music."

I liked that. I knew I stuck to this book for a reason.

Also about art in general rather than specifically music, but it's one of my favourites:

"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence."
-Oscar Wilde

"Whenas her lute is tunéd to her voice,
The air grows proud for honour of that sound,
And rocks do leap to show how they rejoice
That in the earth such music should be found."

Giles Fletcher

"Without music, life would be an error."
Friedrich Nietzsche.
I could try and find something more articulate and fancy, this pretty much sums it up for me tho.