Quotes By Kishore Kumar

I'm mad, true. But only about one thing. Horror movies. I love spooks. They are a friendly fearsome lot. Very nice people, actually, if you get to know them. Not like these industry chaps out here.

I have three best friends in this world. What's surprising is that they also happen to be your (audience) three best friends. They are Bachpan (childhood), Jawani (Youth) and Budhapa (old age).

Directors know nothing. I never had the privilege of working with any good director. Except Satyen Bose and Bimal Roy, no one even knew the ABC of filmmaking.

I am determined to get out of this futile rat race and live as I've always wanted to. In my native Khandwa, the land of my forefathers.

Very often I would mix up my lines and look angry in a romantic scene or romantic in the midst of a fierce battle.

I only wanted to sing. Never to act. But somehow, thanks to peculiar circumstances, I was persuaded to act in the movies. I hated every moment of it and tried virtually every trick to get out of it.

Songs should follow the state of mind of the actor on screen. It can be grammatically perfect, you know, with all those embellishments that the ustads are good at, only if you're singing for a film on, say, the life of Tansen.

Today's audiences will not accept the unreality of a ceremonial piece of music every now and then.

We playback singers develop a lot of vanity. We tend to think of ourselves as singers independent of the script.

In the early days I used to rely on a personal system of notations where the letters on high notes kept rising above the line. But that really called for extra long sheets. But you don't need notations in Indian music really. You need them when you're using harmony.

I have a good memory, and that helps. When that fails there is always a tape-recorder to fall back on.

It is my livelihood. But its responsibility lies with the film makers who, after 50 years of sound film, have not been able to give cinema an identity of its own.

When a man and a woman roll over each other on velvet grass in Kashmir valley, you expect them to make love - not sing in the voices of Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar.

Lata is the goddess of singing; she fully knows about my admiration for her. I think what is more frequently criticised is not my attitude to colleagues but my attitude to singing for films.

Playback singing is fun and good money. But it's no big art really; only the film and record people glorify it with all those gold and silver discs given to singers. I wish I could take all of them to the goldsmith and draw the metal out.

Look at the prohibitive taxes for those who are really successful. The tax raids, the complicated laws and bylaws, the hassles - they all make popularity a punishable offence.

I'm tired of this life in Bombay. I just want to start over again at my old place, in the company of all those little people whom I grew up with. If I sing, I want to do it for myself.

You don't expect music to be brilliant when the films are so bad.

Jeetendra, Sridevi, what kind of film and what kind of music do you expect with these ingredients? The industry is full of shopkeepers who're out to make money - not art.

The B-movies that are doing good business now cater to an audience which wants a lot of noise to fill the soundtrack.,. and a lot of feminine flesh to fill the optical track.