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Quotes by Composer
"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."
May,
25
"There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life."
25
"No one bill will cure the problem of spam. It will take a combined effort of legislation, litigation, enforcement, customer education, and technology solutions."
25
"Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember."
25
"The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get."
25
"Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way."
25
"I am convinced that there are universal currents of Divine Thought vibrating the ether everywhere and that any who can feel these vibrations is inspired."
25
"These days people wallow in enormous masses of sound."
25
"The best way to investigate the elusive phenomenon called the creative process may well be to target all the misconceptions, to explain what the creative process is not."
May,
25
"I'm not saying that there weren't other inherent problems with the score that couldn't have been overcome with a bit of remixing, but why did they ask me to do it, and why did Griffin ask me to do it this way, for a film that had nothing to do with American vernacular?"
25
"Behind me the branches of a wasted and sterile existence are cracking."
25
"I began to think, now is the time. I found quite a lot of opposition in Hollywood about the idea of doing a film musical and we ended up having to buy the rights back. I'm glad we did because it meant John and I were able to make exactly the movie we wanted."
25
"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."
25
"It seems like we are moving towards something, some kind of point and it is probably going to be an important point in our development or dissolution. That is what everybody seems to be thinking."
25
"There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry."
25
"When I'm dead twenty-five years, people are going to begin to recognize me."
25
"Because, also the world of showbiz is not just black and white, good and bad."
25
"If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?"
25
"How does my music connect to an audience? That is just a complete mystery to me."
24
"I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time."
24
"The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range of pop and other materials and techniques required of them than I probably would, faced with the same challenge."
24
"Victor Young had been hired to write the score for the dances of The Ten Commandments but he became very ill. You were then hired to write the score. But at the same time you'd written The Man with the Golden Arm score."
24
"The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music."
24
"Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village."
24
"Love or not, I wouldn't subject a wife to the road. It's punishment."
24
"You know, when we were kids, we had to go to a theater to see a movie. And then television came in and you had to wait until midnight to see the one you wanted to see. Now, all you've got to do is go to a store and buy it and you can watch it whenever you want!"
24
"Even if I went off to some other career, I hope I would still be doing Coen films."
24
"Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise."
24
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