Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
They want me to give another concert but I have no desire to do so. You cannot imagine what a torture the three days before a public appearance are to me.
I feel like a novice, just as I felt before I knew anything of the keyboard. It is far too original, and I shall end up not being able to learn it myself.
I must confess, my Spanish is not so good - except I read a little, so I started with the English but then determined that it would have to be in Spanish.
The music of this opera (Madame Butterfly) was dictated to me by God. I was merely instrumental in getting it on paper and communicating it to the public.
I consider music like a mirage in the desert. You're obsessed with the ideal piece of music, and the more you think you're getting closer, it's not there.
After you start learning all about the mechanics of piloting a riverboat, you stop seeing all the pretty sunsets and you start thinking about the weather.
I feel like there are messages. I feel like there are angels. I feel that there is a legacy and an energy. And I feel that it's possible to tap into that.
Or in other works I have also projected the sound in a cube of loudspeakers. The sound can move vertically and diagonally at all speeds around the public.
The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment.
I love being a writer-director. I couldn't imagine directing without writing it. You have to write and tell your stories - that's what directing is to me.
I never feel that my music is sparse or minimalist; the way fat people never really think they're fat. I certainly don't consider myself minimalist at all
That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer.
Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge.
If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.
Having in my life been bitten by the jaws of both victory and defeat, I must rush to add that success is to failure as butter pecan ice cream is to death.
I liked my father a lot, but I didn't see him very often because my mother was bitter about him. He remarried, and I used to have to sneak off to see him.
What I've learned is that it's okay to take from heroes, such as Debussy, but it has to be filtered through my own personality so that ultimately it's me.
God is ever before my eyes. I realize his omnipotence and I fear His anger; but I also recognize his compassion, and His tenderness towards His creatures.
Neither rejoice nor lament prematurely; for whatever may happen, all will be well if we only have health; for happiness exists--merely in the imagination.
Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.
I love the song 'Picasso Baby,' and I think the performance art piece was brilliant. I love that fact that Jay Z is continuing to raise the bar on hip hop.
I don't like to focus on just hip-hop because with hip-hop, I can only do so much; with a vocalist, I can only do so much, but the limitations are varying.
In horror movies today it's lots of fast cut shot and lots of loud noises on the soundtrack. I tried to do the opposite. Playing with silence for instance.
I'm not pretending I can change the world, or to be an expert on social and political affairs. But I certainly have a right to say when something is wrong.
Music is truly love itself, the purest, most ethereal language of the emotions, embodying all their changing colors in every variety of shading and nuance.
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.
The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.
Since I'm allergic to various things, the army wouldn't accept me during the war, and I got into the Office of War Information, which sent music to Europe.
Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I don't understand why this happens in the movie industry.
The principal task of a conductor is not to put himself in evidence but to disappear behind his functions as much as possible. We are pilots, not servants.
No one really understands the grief or joy of another. We always imagine that we are approaching some other, but our lines of travel are actually parallel.
Perhaps two million years ago the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today.
I liked rock music going back to the '60s, but I never ever had any desire to be a rock musician and when I started doing a band it was experimental music.
The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry.
You won't now tell people you're in your 60′s Indeed, you'll have to pretend, no end That you're close to being 70 Let me be the first to agree, old friend
I mean I have had a very combative relationship with critics because I'm very impatient with people that don't give my work the respect I feel it deserves.
I create work, and I devote myself to the creative process, and I try to, you know, stay pure in that process and be worthy of the messages that I receive.
And I'll never forget the first time I took the possibility to project sound every day for six or seven hours with special devices which were built for me.
I'm not talking ideas, or even presentation. It's like in politics: You have to sell something to become an electric player - like your skin or your heart.
Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made.
I never feel that my music is sparse or minimalist; the way fat people never really think they're fat. I certainly don't consider myself minimalist at all.
All old music was modern once, and much more of the music of yesterday already sounds more old-fashioned than works which were written three centuries ago.
Attack and defence, want and war, victory and defeat, lordship and thraldom, all sealed with the seal of blood: this from henceforth is the History of Man.
The fact is popular art dates. It grows quaint. How many people feel strongly about Gilbert and Sullivan today compared to those who felt strongly in 1890?
I am not thoughtless but am prepared for anything and as a result can wait patiently for whatever the future holds in store, and I'll be able to endure it.
Now let the matter rest as it is, or as it may be, what avail useless speculations? What is to occur we do not know; still in so far we do! what God wills!
Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.
I like what I hear as a resulting combination of these two strands... something of a combination of familiarity and, for lack of a better word, strangeness.
I hung around hippie-ish kind of people and, first of all, they never made any money. If you never make any money, you never have to declare any profession!
Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.