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"Hopefully, I have a certain amount of what you call musical talent."
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"There is only one school of literature - that of talent."

"There is a difference between talented people and gifted people.Talented people are good AT something, Gifted people ARE that something."

"You need to find your gift, something you are doing better than others."

"Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions."

"With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy."

"If you have the ability to see the things behind the scenes, then you have the greatest talent one can ever have because there is almost always something else behind the things!"
Explore more quotes by Leo Ornstein

"I'm really interested in writing a piece of music that will move you, that will really move you. That is really the only reason that I'm writing music."

"Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided."

"We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising."

"No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music."

"Now, what we are not talking about, what you're really coming to, is what compromises one makes so that the listener understands somewhat of what you're doing, what you're trying to express."

"Well, no. I believe that it's not at all impossible that some of the performances that I've heard so far by some pianists may be superior to my own playing because those are two totally different acts altogether."

"I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing."

"Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing."
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