Recording Quotes

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, What happened to your hand? And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

~ Tom Waits

There has never been a time in human history where so many people routinely carry recording and surveillance devices.

~ Steven Magee

Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The best thing to do when someone is trying to argue with you is to repeatedly state Stay Away and video record the entire event. You may need that video for the police afterwords when the aggressor starts fabricating fantasies about the event.

~ Steven Magee

[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.

~ Elizabeth F. Loftus

In a sense, the recording stylus and its reverse component have defeated time. Up until a little more than a generation ago, the sound of a word once uttered, a violin note once played, were possible treasures dropped into the none too safe repository of human memory; but the same sounds transferred to a wax or plastic or film or wire can live and vibrate again fifteen minutes or fifty years from now.

~ Judith C. Waller

Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss and now too distant ever to be recaptured!...What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?

~ Villiers De L'isle-Adam

People that have a police car behind them pulling them over should put on their hazard lights and continue slowly driving to the nearest densely populated public place, such as a supermarket or shopping center. Pull over outside the busy entrance and start your video camera. Inform the police officer that you are video recording and very slowly give the requested documentation. Exercise your legal right to silence while the many independent witnesses video record the unexpected stop that rudely interrupts your day. If you are given a ticket, choose to go to court. It will give you time to obtain independent legal advice about the allegation.

~ Steven Magee

When you realize that incompetent police officers are harassing you, you need to call 911 and demand that a police supervisor be immediately dispatched to the scene. In the mean time you need to be video recording everything, as police officers are known for their blatant lies and fabrications.

~ Steven Magee

If I could record them and transmit them to the present age, they would constitute nothing more, nowadays, than dead sounds. They would be, in a word, sounds other than what they actually were, and from what their phonographic labels pretended they were – since it's in ourselves that the silence exists. It was while the sounds were still mysterious that it would have been really interesting to render the mystery palpable and transferable.

~ Villiers De L'isle-Adam

If I am ever unexpectedly stopped in my car by the police, my response after pulling over in a populated area is to politely and clearly inform them that I am unarmed, I am recording everything, if they want to take me to the police station that they will need to appoint a lawyer, and I am now using my USA federal right to silence.

~ Steven Magee

In the era of angry and aggressive policing, it is an honorable service to your fellow citizens to video record police officers interactions with the common people.

~ Steven Magee

He shook hands. With greening faces, with eyes full of sparks, his two friends leaned upon their canes. One had on a crushed bowler (why?)... Both were weary. Both knew that what was approaching was the end. Both had spent the day in their offices and when they interrupted their work with an indiscreet nod, when they turned the conversation toward that end, both broke in Lord, we have strayed from our business. And ever deeper sunk their eyes, a deathly shadow was descending. The words of his friends had been bought with blood, but they were stolen. Someone, listening, recorded them on a phonograph and thousands of cylinders began to twang. A new enterprise opened, on sale a bronze throat, a screaming cavity; an experienced mechanic installed the throat phonograph. The purchased throat squealed day and night and his friends grew exhausted and one day he said to them both Lord, I am going. He grinned. And they grinned: they understood everything. Now they stood on the platform, stood with him and saw him off. Someone long and dark with the face of an ox, shoulders crooked as a sorrowful cemetery cross and wrapped up in a frock-coat, swept into the coach. And then the bell rang, and then they waved their bowlers; three wooden arms swung in the air.(Adam)

~ Andrei Bely

He wouldn't perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradition who had been contaminated by the advent of the recording device and so insisted that all improvisations be saved for posterity.

~ David Cronenberg

Do billboard salesmen record their sales on charts? If so, who's at the top of the billboard charts for billboard sales?

~ Ryan Lilly

We sometimes take photos (or record a video) so that we can later see what was happening while we were busy taking photos (or recording a video).

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Time and space travel is easily achievable using tape. The physicality of the recordings allow us to jaunt to any location and time. There isn’t enough scope for arbitrary and random interjections with digital recordings. There must be an unconscious input from the recorder to traverse the cosmos.

~ Steven Lavey