David Gilmour

David Jon Gilmour (born 6 March 1946) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, and philanthropist, best known as the guitarist and co-lead vocalist of the rock band Pink Floyd.

• You shout in your sleep.
  Perhaps the price is just too steep.
  Is your conscience at rest if once put to the test?
  You awake with a start to just the beating of your heart.
  Just one man beneath the sky,
  Just two ears, just two eyes.
  • "Childhood's End", on Obscured by Clouds (1972)

• You find your eyes are growing moist.
  All the fears never voiced say you have to make your final choice.
  • "Childhood's End", on Obscured by Clouds (1972)

• Who are you and who am I
  To say we know the reason why
  Some are born, some men die,
  Beneath one infinite sky?
  There'll be war, there'll be peace,
  But everything one day will cease,
  All the iron turned to rust,
  All the proud men turned to dust,
  And so all things time will mend,
  So this song will end.
  • "Childhood's End", on Obscured by Clouds (1972)

• Syd's story is a sad story romanticised by people who don't know anything about it. They've made it fashionable but it's just not that way.
  • As quoted in Musician (December 1982)

• 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.
  • As quoted in Sounds : Guitar Heroes (May 1983)

• Roger doesn't have the right at present to tell me what to do with my life, although he believes that he does. And he'll not ruin my career, although lately he's been trying to.
  • As quoted in Penthouse (September 1988)

• He had developed his own limited, or very simple style. He was never very keen on improving himself as a bass player and half the time I would play bass on the records because I would tend to do it quicker. Right back to those early records; I mean, at least half the bass on all recorded output is me anyway. … Rog used to come in and say, "Thank you very much" to me once in a while for winning him bass-playing polls.
  • On Roger Waters, as quoted in Rock Compact Disc (September 1992)

• I've been in The Who, I've been in The Beatles and I've been in Pink Floyd! Top that!
  • Record Collector (May 2003)

• 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.
  • On guitar solos, in an interview in Time, quoted in Classic Albums: Pink Floyd – The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon (2003)

• It's crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations.
  • Comment regarding the Pink Floyd reunion concert to protest G8 policies, as quoted in The Scotsman (June 2005)

• The band? It's over. Reunited because of the good cause (Live 8), to get over the bad relationship, and not to have regrets.
  • Ruling out the possibility of a permanent reunion of Pink Floyd in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica (February 2006)

Quotes of Gilmour from the Pink Floyd concert film, or DVD editions of it.

• Where would rock and roll be without feedback?
  • Dark Side of the Moon Sessions

• Jimi Hendrix isn't as good as me!
  • Dark Side of the Moon Sessions

• Obviously, they're all a gang of idiots. But, you know... live and let live.
  • About the band, in Dark Side of the Moon Sessions

Quotes from the BBC documentary The Kate Bush Story (2014)

• I had a listen, I was intrigued … by this strange voice, and I went to her house, met her parents down in Kent, and she played me, it must have been forty or fifty songs, on tape, and I thought, I should try to do something. … We were making — Pink Floyd was making the Wish You Were Here album, and I think we had the record company people down at Abbey Road, in number 3, and I said to them "Do you want to hear something I've got? And they said "sure", so we found another room, and I played it to them, "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", and they said "Yep, thank you – we'll have it."
  • On first hearing 15-year-old Kate Bush's demo tapes, and meeting with her.

• It is absolutely beautiful, isn't it? And its a sort of over two years before any of the other recordings she did. That is her singing at the age of 16, and having written those extraordinary lyrics — about whatever they're about.
  • Listening to The Man with the Child in His Eyes

"David Gilmour: Why I’m Bringing Back Pink Floyd After 28 Years", Rolling Stone (8 April 2022)

• We want to spread this message of peace, and we want to raise the morale of the people who are defending their homeland there in Ukraine.
  • On his inspiration to collaborate with Andriy Khlyvnyuk after seeing his rendition of the 1914 Ukrainian patriotic march "Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow" by adding Pink Floyd musical adaptations to produce the composition "Hey, Hey, Rise Up!" as a means of funding humanitarian relief in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. - Official lyrics video at YouTube: "Hey, Hey, Rise Up"

• Russia is not full of terrible people. It’s just that their leadership has gone so horribly wrong. ... A lot of the world is reacting in the right way. They are angry and they are frustrated. You can see and hear the frustration in the leaders of the other world’s countries. We can see it in the voice of your president, President Biden. He has let slip a couple of his feelings a couple of times over there. Other world leaders have done the same. And I think there’s a groundswell of opinion worldwide. This sort of thing shouldn’t be able to happen. It shouldn’t be able to be allowed. But we are in a world where still, here we are, a fifth of the way through the 21st century and still this obscene situation can happen. The mind boggles.

• Official website
• Official blog
• Bootleg recordings