52 Quotes by Leo Kottke

The bulk of my set is instrumental and you have to give yourself and the audience some relief because a performance is not about great guitar playing it's really about entertainment.

The principle element in a performance is risk, and if you're losing interest then by scaring yourself to death the audience will feel it and boy it'll wake them up.

When a record company looks at me I'm very hard to market, I don't really fit anywhere, It's hard to get me on the air, and I'm hard to demography, but! because of that I'm not subject to trends like you pointed out.

When the audience is awful you can still have a great night and people will walk out thinking they had a great time even though there was loads of loudmouths and the sound was terrible.

Yes and for two reasons: one, I couldn't find anything to imitate at the time, and secondly because what I heard on the radio didn't bear any resemblance to what I wanted to hear on the guitar.

I will literally open my mouth not knowing what is coming out.

I am evidence that you don't have to sell a lot of records or succeed in the usual way to have a big audience and a job.

There are nights when you can feel stale because you've fallen into a pattern by touring too much, but it's easy to get out of it by deliberately getting in trouble and playing yourself into a corner to then see if you can get out of it.

We really don't talk much about how this is or why it works for us. We'll just start playing. ... It's more like a dream that's coming forward.