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"It is obvious that anything a scientist discovers or invents is based on previous discoveries and inventions. The same applies to the arts."
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"We fixed on No. 4, Queen Street Place, for our City offices, and it was from there that so many of my patented inventions were dated."
"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance itself."
"Wonderful invention, the phonograph. Keeps a man alive long after he's dead."
"As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality."
"Most of them are doomed to rapid extinction, but a few may make evolutionary inventions, such as physiological, ecological, or behavioral innovations that give these species improved competitive potential."
"I did not grasp all these details - and many more - right away. They came to my notice with time and as a result of necessity. I would be in the direst of dire straits, facing a bleak future, when some small thing, some detail, would transform itself and appear in my mind in a new light. It would no longer be the small thing it was before, but the most important thing in the world, the thing that would save my life. This happened time and again. How true it is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true."
"Television has some lovely aspects to it - and some ghastly aspects - but the theater itself was a wonderful invention."
"The digital camera is a great invention because it allows us to reminisce. Instantly."
"Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift."
Explore more quotes by Lukas Foss
"I don't dare postulate about science, but I know that it takes both emotion and intellect in order for art to happen."
"That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it."
"The creative act is like writing a letter. A letter is a project; you don't sit down to write a letter unless you know what you want to say and to whom you want to say it."
"I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own."
"Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved."
"To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together."
"As I sit down and start to work, I often panic. I stare at the empty piece of music paper. How can I say that my piece will be ready for performance next January when I do not have a recipe for making it happen?"
"Why do we pigeonhole and label an artist? It is a sure way of missing the important, the contradictory, the things that make him or her unique."
"Personality is essential. It is in every work of art. When someone walks on stage for a performance and has charisma, everyone is convinced that he has personality. I find that charisma is merely a form of showmanship. Movie stars usually have it. A politician has to have it."
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