Quotes by Composers - Page 4

Let's dance and sing and make good cheer For Christmas comes but once a year.
G. MacFarren
If the life and death of Socrates were those of a sage the life and death of Jesus were those of a God.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Childhood - a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
Igor Stravinsky
There is not a single ill-doer who could not be turned to some good.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
As one gets older one discovers everything is going to be exactly the same with different hats on.
Noël Coward
The luck of having talent is not enough one must also have a talent for luck.
Hector Berlioz
John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
Anthony Burgess
I hate books they teach us only to talk about what we do not know.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
Anthony Burgess
We learn from experience. A man never wakes up his second baby just to see it smile.
Grace Williams
To what do you attribute your advanced age? Well I suppose I must attribute it to the fact that I have not died.
Sir Malcolm Sargent
Do you love me because I'm beautiful or am I beautiful because you love me?
Oscar Hammerstein
Art is a kind of illness.
Giacomo Puccini
Art is not an end in itself but a means of addressing humanity.
M. P. Moussorgsky
I am convinced it is a mistake to find an artist human outside his work. If you cannot find him human in and through his work you are better not to know it when you come to formulate an opinion of his public value.
Kenneth Winters
Art is not an end in itself but a means of addressing humanity.
Modest Mussorgsky
Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.
John Cage
Artists by definition innocent don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.
Ned Rorem
Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out while Romantic grows from outside in.
Ned Rorem
I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Dancing is the body made poetic.
Ernst Bacon
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Duke Ellington
It's never too late to have a fling For autumn is just as nice as spring And it's never too late to fall in love.
Sandy Wilson
I have learned little from the years that fly but I have wrung the colour from the years.
Frances Pollock
Old age is a time of humiliations the most disagreeable of which for me is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
Igor Stravinsky
If I'd known I was gonna live this long (100 years) I'd have taken better care of myself.
James Hubert Blake
A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
Duke Ellington
Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
Fridiric Chopin
Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it.
Irving Berlin
I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician
Charlie Chaplin
To come up with one great sentence, one needs to serve a life sentence.
Lera Auerbach
Death defines life. I'd rather stay undefined.
Lera Auerbach
Bad people? What kind of bad people? Members of the Church of Satan? Insurance salesmen? People who don’t speak English?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
I like your opera - I think I will set it to music
Ludwig van Beethoven
The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like.
Frank Zappa
Put 'em who threaten possessions and power together with 'em who offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who're touched, put 'em in asylums. Pack off old ones to 'senior communities,' nursing homes. Our children? Keep'em prisoner, baby-sitter as warden. School? Good for fifteen to twenty years. Army afterward. Liberated, we live in prison. No this, no that. Kill us before we die!
John Cage
Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it about like marmalade.
Noël Coward
A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl.
Charlie Chaplin
Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.
Charlie Chaplin
I suppose that's one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.
Charlie Chaplin
To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Anthony Burgess
Many critics are born of envy.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
And now, the end is near,And so I face the final curtain.My friend, I'll say it clear,I'll state my case, of which I'm certain.I've lived a life that's full.I've traveled each and every highway;And more, much more than this,I did it my way.
Jacques Revaux
I judge the world by my own lightsand I come by my own hand.
Catherine Madsen
College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.
John Cage
A folktale without a moral is merely a whimsy.
Stephen Sondheim
I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.
Anthony Burgess
Her mouth— ah, that lush, sweet mouth— was a garden, and I was on my back, face tipped in adoration to the sun for giving me such brilliance, delightful aromas, and the indescribable lightness of being with her.
Julia Kent
Must it all be either less or more,Either plain or grand?Is it always 'or'?Is it never 'and'?That's what woods are for:For those moments in the woods...Oh, if life were made of moments,Even now and then a bad one--!But if life were only moments,Then you'd never know you had one....to get what you wish, only just for a moment--These are dangerous woods!Let the moment go...Don't forget it for a moment, though.Just remembering you had an 'and,' when you're back to 'or,'Makes the 'or' mean more than is did before.Now I understand--And it's time to leave the woods.
Stephen Sondheim
Was that me? Yes it was. Was that him? No it wasn't..t Just a trick of the woods!t Just a moment,t One peculiar passing moment.t Must it all be either less or more,t Either plain or grand?t Is it always 'or'?t Is it never 'and'?t That's what woods are for:t For those moments in the woods...t Oh, if life were made of moments,t Even now and then a bad one--!t But if life were only moments,t Then you'd never know you had one.t First a witch, then a child, then a Prince, then a moment--t Who can live in the woods?t And to get what you wish, only just for a moment--t These are dangerous woods..t Let the moment go..t Don't forget it for a moment, though.t Just remembering you had an 'and,' when you're back to 'or,'t Makes the 'or' mean more than is did before.t Now I understand--And it's time to leave the woods.
Stephen Sondheim
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
One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.
Jaron Lanier
Remember, there are more people in the world than yourself. Be modest! You have not yet invented nor thought anything which others have not thought or invented before. And should you really have done so, consider it a gift of heaven which you are to share with others.
Robert Schumann
I don't like zombie movies, they're just plain silly.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Whether the woman shares the man's passion or not, whether she is willing or unwilling to satisfy it, she always repulses him and defends herself, though not always with the same vigour, and therefore not always with the same success.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The present day composer refuses to die.
Edgard Varèse
Biogeography typically trumps taxonomy and anticipates molecular phylogeny
Dennis McCarthy
New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations where a fifty-thousand dollar, gun-metal Mercedez pulls up into a puddle of blood, and out steps a twenty-five karat blonde transvestite with a two dollar wristwatch.
Tom Waits
Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.
Irving Berlin