Composing Quotes

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

I don't meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing and composing as meditative acts.

Every day I lugged my backpack through the halls, waiting for the final bell.

Then I'd race home and hole up in my room, playing the drums and the piano, composing music.

What I so like about Poussin and Cezanne is their sense of organization.

Ilike the way in which they develop space and shape in architecturalcontinuity - the rhythm across their paintings. When I paint a landscape, Iget the greatest pleasure out of composing it. As I paint, I try to work outa visual sonata form or a fugue, with realistic images.

There is the happiness which comes from creative effort.

The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

Sometimes I have a notion that what might improve the situation is to have women take over the occupations of government and trade and to give men their freedom. Let them do what they are best at. While we scrawl interoffice memos and direct national or extranational affairs, men could spend all their time inventing wheels, peering at stars, composing poems, carving statues, exploring continents -- discovering, reforming, or crying out in a sacramental wilderness. Efficiency would probably increase, and no one would have to worry so much about the Gaza Strip or an election.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it -- a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.

Composing a piece of music is very feminine.

It is sensitive, emotional, contemplative. By comparison, doing housework is positively masculine.

I love making music, I love composing on my computer, just making crazy ethnic slack orchestral tracks, that's one of my fun things.

Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house.

Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.

The composing room has an unlimited supply of periods available to terminate short, simple sentences.

You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.

The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others.

I think I've done more recording in the past 10 years than most people, but it's all been directed toward film composing and soundtracks. Just the same, it's been great.

The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini.

When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French.

I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

I did quite a lot of the arranging, fitting different sections together, tempo changes, all sorts of things like that. I actually acted as a bridge between Robert and Ian. Not so much composing, rather presenting musical ideas at each rehearsal.

Composing is my life blood.

I think my playing has been orchestral throughout the years, and this is another way of expressing that. But I primarily see it as the ultimate accomplishment of a musician. Composing makes me feel like I've finally gotten all the way up the ladder as a musician.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

My mother also had us take piano lessons, and this had a similar effect.

I hated those lessons, but I now play regularly for pleasure and have even tried my hand at composing.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore.

I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

I don't like to box myself in when I'm composing.

When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.

There are people who must spend huge amounts of time composing these online diatribes against me, all about how disgusting and terrible I am and how no one should ever read my books, and it's not enough for them to hate me, they can't stand the fact that ANYONE likes me!

However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

Since I started composing I have always worked with series of tempos, even superimposed the music of different groups of musicians, of singers, instrumentalists who play and sing in different tempos simultaneously and then meet every now and then in the same tempo.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

I have come up with very creative ideas that really didn't work with the song I was currently composing.

Being in the studio is okay but sitting in a room by yourself composing is a discipline that takes a certain type of mind set and Tommy has a great gift for that as did the previous guy.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems.

The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

I don't meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing & composing as meditative acts.

I really want to do the unexpected, and I think that's what I did when I executed 'Long.Live.A$AP.' I wanted people to really see the message and that I'm an artist who not only has the capability of rapping, but of composing great music both for people of my generation and for people with different backgrounds.

What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

Ever since Two Daughters I've been composing my own music.

There is nothing greater than the joy of composing something oneself and then listening to it.