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"I don't hate work, composing is not work for me, it's my pleasure; it's my life. So why should I stop? If something is pleasurable and exciting and rewarding, why should one stop?"
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"If you need an alarm clock, you need a new job."

"Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do."

"The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well."

"Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don't complain."

"Our highly qualified teachers not only work hard, but they care about each and every student that enters their classroom. I thank you, Montana teachers, for your sense of duty and compassion to our precious future generation."

"I'm a performer. I push the envelope, I work in a very uncontrolled manner onstage. I do a lot of free association, it's spontaneous, I go into character."

"The strategy of my coach and me was that we looked at pictures of all the best pole vaulters from around the world, and we took the best parts from them, and we created a person that had never existed. We then started to work toward being such a person."
Explore more quotes by Gunther Schuller


"But somehow, I felt no inclination to be interested in it in any amateur way, let alone professional, until suddenly I became interested. And the first thing I did was to compose: not play an instrument, but to compose."


"And it is this sense that some of us have to contribute to the culture, to the society in ways that may hurt financially, so what? We do it because we are born to do it, we feel we have no other choice and so be it."


"So this anchoring in some way, in some important way in the past without repeating the past, but on the basis of the past building something new: that is what is important."


"After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz."


"I would like to read some books: I don't have time; I would like to continue working on my autobiography."


"So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things together in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty musicians to do this it was something extraordinary."


"You know, I'm not gonna take my money with me to heaven or hell, wherever I'm going. So I want to do something good with it even though my means are very limited. I'm no millionaire!"


"Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations."
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