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Quotes by Composer
"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
24
"A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance."
24
"A politician is a man who will double cross that bridge when he comes to it."
23
"I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s."
22
"Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors."
21
"Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been put up to a critic."
21
"What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds."
20
"I guess we've had a very close relationship because I don't pretend to know about cinema and I think I do know a bit about theatre but he does, he respected that and so we really just had a collaboration which went completely like this."
20
"The whole problem of the sound-work is distancing oneself from the dramatic."
20
"Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it."
20
"I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena."
20
"I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.'"
20
"I learned from my uncle that jazz, like symphony music, was built to last."
19
"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy."
19
"One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things."
19
"Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light."
19
"Musicians are always gigging and never have a chance to stop for a minute."
19
"We appropriately compared the lifestyle to that of drug addiction and alcoholism - lifestyles that one would be encouraged to seek help to leave - never encouraged to stay in."
18
"Beware of missing chances; otherwise it may be altogether too late some day."
18
"Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple."
18
"A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own. This is common sense."
18
"Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience."
18
"Broad paths are open to every endeavour, and a sympathetic recognition is assured to every one who consecrates his art to the divine services of a conviction of a consciousness."
18
"What I gave I have, what I spent I had, what I left I lost by not giving it."
18
"Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes."
18
"If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow."
17
"Conductors don't suffer, they are part of the performance."
17
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