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"It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else."
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"Not everyone who loves music can play the tune."

"It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists."

"The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our decision to create new and startling things. We always ended up by producing the same old show. In the beginning, our enthusiasm and ideals discarded as rubbish all the old fossilized plots."

"A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories."

"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."

"Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing."

"The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity."
Explore more quotes by Carlisle Floyd

"We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them."

"If something is successful with the audience, it's automatically suspect; the reverse is to say that not to reach audiences is the greatest compliment an artist can receive!"

"Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations."

"I was interested in what was really going on in Salem at that time, and I resolved to investigate this seemingly unorthodox treatment of the people and the period."

"The performances of my works in the last 10 years are probably equal to all the previous years put together. There are so many venues now and there is a completely new public for opera that's grown up outside of the traditional core opera public."

"It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story."

"America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn't put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist."

"It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience."
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