Quotes by Composers - Page 6

Wish You Were Here So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, Blue skys from pain. Can you tell a green field From a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? And did they get you to trade Your heros for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze? Cold comfort for change? And did you exchange A walk on part in the war For a lead role in a cage? How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here.
Roger Waters
Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.
Anthony Burgess
Only chance to make the world a success for humanity lies in technology, grand possibility technology provides to do more with less, and indiscriminately for everyone. Return to nature as nature pre-technologically was, attractive and possible as it still in some places is, can only work for some of us.
John Cage
All that technical expertise isn't worth a damn if you don't get the best out of people, though. . . . These were leaders who saw strength in ordinary people and showed them how to break tyranny.
Noël Coward
There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
...I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless...
Anthony Burgess
nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by playing a piece of musicour ears are now in excellent condition.
John Cage
Sarcasm is a manifestation of anger, and anger can make you the puppet of your opponents.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Politics and justice seldom walk hand in hand.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in business. You've got to keep working that talent.
Irving Berlin
The human spirit will not invest itself in a compromise.
Robert Fritz
You have to hate them, you mean? You can’t decide: I will or I won’t hate them?”Amar did not completely understand. “But I hate them now,” he explained. “The day Allah wants me to stop hating them, He’ll change my heart.”The man was smiling, as if to himself. “If the world’s really like that, it’s very easy to be in it,” he said.“It will never be easy to be in the world,” Amar said firmly. “Er tabi mabrhach. God doesn’t want it easy.
Paul Bowles
None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.
Edmund Crispin
Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Oscar Levant
We don't really know anything. Those who accept this are more likely to learn something.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
I've decided I don't like books that end with 'The End'. The fact that there are no more pages, suggests to me that the book has ended.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
The piano ain't got no wrong notes.
Thelonious Monk
Envy suggests inferiority.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Security is a false god begin making sacrifices to it and you are lost.
Paul Bowles
As one gets older one discovers everything is going to be exactly the same with different hats on.
Noël Coward
Patriotism is too deep a feeling to depict in the posing for a photograph.
Charlie Chaplin
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky
A place without meaning is no place to be.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Moments come & moments go, but can last a lifetime in your heart. Make them count!
Mark Hewer
I choose me bristles with prideYes, I doA broom for the shaftAnd a broom for the flumeThough I'm covered with soot From me 'ead to me toesA sweep knows 'e's welcomeWherever 'e goes
Richard M. Sherman
Applaud my friends, the comedy is over...[on his death bed]
Ludwig van Beethoven
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
Igor Stravinsky
Studies consistently show that happy companies are way more productive, creative and service-oriented than unhappy ones. Therefore, the happy companies will beat the pants off the unhappy ones in the market place. The future of business is happy! It’s inevitable.
Alexander Kjerulf
What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
Anthony Burgess
Art is making something out of nothing, and selling it.
Frank Zappa
In every colour there's the light.In every stone sleeps a crystal.Remember the Shaman, when he used to say:Man is the dream of the dolphin
Enigma
Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.
Woflgang Amadeus Mozart
By the time I had complete my 22nd year, I was a new man - an atheist.
Béla Bartók
Beryl: Beryl is a warm gemstone which develops, between the third hour and midday, from the foam of water when the sun burns it severely. Its power is thus more from air and water than from fire, but nevertheless it has some of the properties of fire. And if a man has drunk or eaten poison, then he should place a little beryl in spring water and drink it at once. Continue for five days drinking it once a day while fasting, and the poison will foam up through vomiting, or it will pass out of him through the rear.
Hildegard of Bingen
You are perfectly cast in your life. I can't imagine anyone but you in the role. Go play.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
The more you can escape from how horrible things really are, the less it's going to bother you...and then, the worse things get.
Frank Zappa
If once he has got the right fingering, plays in good time, with the notes fairly correct, then only pull him up about the rendering; and when he has arrived at that stage, don’t let him stop for the sake of small faults, but point them out to him when he has played the piece through. . . I have always adopted this plan; it soon forms musicians which, after all, is one of the first aims of art and it gives less trouble both to master and pupil.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.
Dave Brubeck
How much more reasonable is it to say with the sage Plato, that the perfect happiness of a state consists in the subjects obeying their prince, the prince obeying the laws, and the laws being equitable and always directed to the good of the public?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is impossible to be truly artistic without the risk of offending someone somewhere.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
For the record, folks; I never took a shit on stage and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973.
Frank Zappa
A dreamer-you know-it's a mind that looks over the edges of things.
Mary O'Hara
If you surround yourself with people who don't care about you, be prepared for a life of misery.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est.(Applaud, my friends, the comedy is
Ludwig van Beethoven
That our selves and all men are apt and prone to differ it is no new Thing in all former Ages in all parts of this World in these parts and in our deare native Countrey and mournfull state of England.That either part or partie is most right in his owne eye his Cause Right his Cariage Right, his Argumts Right his Answeres Right is as wofully and constantly true as the former. And experience tells us that when the God of peace hath taken peace from the Earth one sparke of Action word or Cariage is too too powrefull to kindle such a fire as burns up Families Townes Cities Armies, Navies Nations and Kingdomes.[Letter of Roger Williams to Town of Providence, August 31, 1648]
Roger Williams
Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.
Satyajit Ray
A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
Jaron Lanier
Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
Anthony Burgess
Without class differences England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
Anthony Burgess
You can’t be happy at work every day. No matter how much you love your job, there are still going to be bad days. And that’s cool—it’s always OK to have a bad day at work.
Alexander Kjerulf
...Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part of it, as was the man opposite him, and it was a part of them; it whispered to them that time was short, that the world they lived in was approaching its end, and beyond was unfathomable darkness. It was the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihilation, and it had always been there with them and in them, as intangible and as real as the night around them. Amar pulled two loose cigarettes out of his pocket and handed one to the potter. "Ah, the Moslems, the Moslems!" he sighed. "Who knows what's going to happen to them?
Paul Bowles
This is reality, back home is routine.
George Ikilikjan
The heart may freeze, or it can burn. The pain will ease and I can learn. There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as, my last.
Jonathan Larson
Music blows lyrics up very quickly, and suddenly they become more than art. They become pompous and they become self-conscious ... I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in.
Stephen Sondheim
They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. Well, if they would not go to school they must have there education. And education they had had.
Anthony Burgess
It would be better to have no school at all than the schools we now have. Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play'd be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.
John Cage
In 1857, Bizet departed for Rome and spent three years there. He studied the landscape, the culture, Italian literature and art. Musically he studied the scores of the great masters. At the end of the first year he was asked to submit a religious work as his required composition. As a self-described atheist, Bizet felt uneasy and hypocritical writing a religious piece. Instead, he submitted a comic opera. Publicly, the committee accepted, acknowledging his musical talent. Privately, the committee conveyed their displeasure. Thus, early in his career, Bizet displayed an independent spirit that would be reflected in innovative ideas in his opera compos
Georges Bizet
Every time I look at you I get a fierce desire to be lonesome.
Oscar Levant
I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?
Frank Zappa