Quotes by Composers - Page 11

There is no such thing as happy music.
Franz Schubert
This will be our reply to violence:to make music more intensely,more beautifully,more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard Bernstein
If I cannot fly, let me sing.
Stephen Sondheim
If, while at the piano, you attempt to form little melodies, that is very well; but if they come into your mind of themselves, when you are not practising, you may be still more pleased; for the internal organ of music is then roused in you. The fingers must do what the head desires; not the contrary.
Robert Schumann
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
John Cage
You know what politique is? It is the French word for a lie. Kdoub! Politique! When you hear the French say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. And when you hear the Moslems, the Friends of Independence, say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. All lies are sins. And so, which displeases Allah more, a lie told by a Nazarene, who doesn’t know the true faith from the false, or a lie told by a Moslem, who does?
Paul Bowles
A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.
Jaron Lanier
I love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles.
Cole Porter
I say to myself: "Who are you to measure infinite power?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The older I get, the better I was.
Van Dyke Parks
People who think animals have expressionless faces are like people who can ignore an open package of Oreos. Not quite human.
Julia Kent
Maybe I'd see how you could be so certain that we had no chance...at all.
Jason Robert Brown
So finally we tumble into the abyss, we ask God why he has made us so feeble. But, in spite of ourselves, He replies through our consciences: 'I have made you too feeble to climb out of the pit, because i made you strong enough not to fall in.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.
Pablo Casals
Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear which remains unsatisfied and even uneasy until it hears something better.
Charles Burney
Ah, fairest maiden, thine beauty doth maketh mine loins stir, and mine cup runneth over.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
John Cage
Good heavens television is something you appear on you don't watch.
Noël Coward
Snake pulled out the digital camera and decided to play a joke on Otacon. He snapped a picture of the pinup, muttered, "Good," and closed the door.
Raymond Benson
To try is to accept the possibility of failure. Simply do.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Over a period of time it's been driven home to me that I'm not going to be the most popular writer in the world so I'm always happy when anything in any way is accepted.
Stephen Sondheim
What’s the old saying? Ah, I remember now. ‘Curiosity flayed the cat alive, ripped it apart limb from limb, and listened to it scream before it killed it.’ That’s the one.
Simon Holt
Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.
Anthony Burgess
Nothing is permanent in this wicked world, not even our troubles.
Charlie Chaplin
Politicians and others are stuck in a horrible world where being emotional in any way counts as being unbalanced, and unable to think clearly. For me, emotions are thought.
Hofesh Shechter
Success is far more perilous than failure, isn’t it? You’ve got to be doubly strong and watchful and wary.
Noël Coward
Well, I'm not here to impinge on anybody else's lifestyle. If I'm in a place where I know I'm going to harm somebody's health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I'm concerned.
Frank Zappa
You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.
Tom Waits
Of what value is your life, unless you are willing to sacrifice it for those you love?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.
Anthony Burgess
May it be written. May it be done.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
If you’ve never been in a men’s room, and have only set foot in the ladies’ room at most fine (and not so fine) establishments, you need to know this: store owners hate men. No, really—this is the one area where women get treated better. We may earn seventy-seven cents on the dollar compared to men, but, by God, our public bathrooms don’t look like something out of a Soviet-era prison. Or worse—a Sochi hotel during the Olympics.
Julia Kent
The future begins today.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.
Anthony Burgess
Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.
Anthony Burgess
The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, "This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Minister: As I was saying, Alex, you can be instrumental in changing the public verdict. Do you understand, Alex? Have I made myself clear?Alex: As an unmuddied lake, Fred. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer. You can rely on me, Fred.
Anthony Burgess
A young gratuitous smile; trust and distrust;Promiscuities of bed and board and road; The one assured treasureA life, in recollection, truly possessed.
Robert Wells
Always remember your days are blessed. You may know how to profit from them or you may not, but they are blessed.
Nadia Boulanger
Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.
John Cage
Music is an outburst of the soul.
Frederick Delius
Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.
Jaron Lanier
I've been told, by various people, that I think too much. This is incorrect! The truth is that I deliberately challenge people to think more than they would like to.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Be the great person you were always meant to be.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.
Paul Bowles
No one really understands the grief or joy of another.
Franz Schubert
Think it a vile habit to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments. This is the greatest insult you can offer to Art.
Robert Schumann
Would you teach me, Seth?’Seth smiled and leaned back in his seat. ‘You do realise, of course, that you have no idea what you ask of me?’ Seth replied after a moment.‘Of course,’ Christopher replied quietly. ‘Could you tell me?’‘No. That is the problem you see,’ Seth said. ‘Magic is something you can never prepare someone for. Magic will make you, Christopher. It will find all the secret empty places of longing in you and fill them more surely than any other love. And magic will break your heart.’ A slight, rather sad smile crossed Christopher’s face for a moment. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You think your heart is already broken, you think that this crooked and winding way is the only path left for you now. But you’re wrong. The heart breaks like every wave on the beach and there’s a darkness you’ll have to pass through that you can’t even see from where you are now.
Lee Morgan
I like to watch the news, because I don't like people very much and when you watch the news ... if you ever had an idea that people were really terrible, you could watch the news and know that you're right.
Frank Zappa
An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their designs, such as comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.
Jaron Lanier
Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The only thing--I tell you this straight from the heart--that disgusts me in Salzburg is that one can't have any proper social intercourse with those people--and that music does not have a better reputation...For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!...A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not--but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes--bad, if he always stays in the same place. If the archbishop would trust me, I would soon make his music famous; that is surely true.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
As a working professional in the entertainment industry, I have come to truly cherish both my creative freedom and my independence. Because I, for one, know how precious and priceless they are.
Cat Ellington
Creators understand that their emotions are not necessarily a sign of the circumstances. They understand that in desperate circumstances they may experience joy, and in jubilant circumstances they may feel regret. They know that any emotion will change. But because emotions are not the centerpiece of their lives, they do not pander to them. They create what they create, not in reaction to their emotions but independent of them. On days filled with the depths of despair, they can create. On days filled with the heights of joy, they can create.
Robert Fritz
As sure as the driven rain, the sun will shine again!
Mark Hewer
The human race is a letdown, Ernest — a bad, bad letdown. And I’m disgusted with it. It thinks it’s progressed, but it hasn’t. It thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime, but it hasn’t. It’s wallowing in it. It’s still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and to our eyes and to our souls. We’ve invented a few things that make noises, but we haven’t invented one big thing that creates quiet. Endless, peaceful quiet. Something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown, something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions.
Noël Coward
If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.
Arnold Schoenberg
To try is to invite uncertainty. Where confidence goes, success usually follows.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
In intimate conversation I am as supportive and positive as the next man, but gatherings of happy people make me miserable. I long to share in the collective joy, but instead I am racked with anxiety.
Joel Derfner