Composing Quotes - Page 4

• I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.

  Erin Morgenstern

  Book, Writing, Order

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• I've been composing music all my life and if I'd been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.

  Anthony Hopkins

  Clever, School, College

  "Anthony Hopkins: 'I've never been really close to anyone'". Interview with John Crace, www.theguardian.com. January 23, 2012.

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• The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures." There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path.

  Michel de Certeau

  Art, Journey, Hiking

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.100, Univ of California Press

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• Yes, sampling has changed not just my way of playing and composing.

  Klaus Schulze

  Sampling, Way, Changed

  Perfect Sound Forever Interview, www.furious.com. May 1997.

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• Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.

  Brenda Ueland

  Writing, Thinking, Drawing

  Brenda Ueland (1980). “Me”, Ayer Company Pub

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• One of the first decisions I made, as the director of "Hide and Seek," was that our film would be silent and use underscoring of original music that I was planning on composing. The decision was mostly predicated on knowing how time consuming the editing of dialogue can be and given the various locations we shot in, I didn't want to worry about having to mix room tones in such a short amount of time.

  Garth Kravits

  Knowing, Editing, Worry

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• I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Should Have, Talent, Born

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• Composing computer programs to solve scientific problems is like writing poetry. You must choose every word with care and link it with the other words in perfect syntax. There is no place for verbosity or carelessness. To become fluent in a computer lnaguage demands almost the antithesis of modern loose thinking. It requires many interactive sessions, the hands-on use of the device. You do not learn a foreign language from a book, rather you have to live in the country for year to let the langauge become an automatic part of you, and the same is true for computer languages.

  James Lovelock

  Country, Book, Writing

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• I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing.

  John Zorn

  Jobs, Ivory Tower, Ideas

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• I love silence. And one of the paradoxes about the way I live and also about my work is that definitely one of the reasons I went into music, and especially into composing is that I love setting up an environment where I can be by myself for long periods of time and have everything as quiet as possible, either to think about sound, or to think about ideas, or just to focus on things that are important to me.

  Tod Machover

  Thinking, Ideas, Long

  Source: bigthink.com

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• When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Writing, Creativity, Color

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.84, Convergent Books

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• We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Thinking, Feelings

  Aldous Huxley (1959). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

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• When it comes to sitting down and composing, there is no hesitation, no concern, no critics breathing fire down my neck. For me, writing a song is the purest part of all. No one can mess with that.

  Rufus Wainwright

  Song, Writing, Fire

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• I don't hate work, composing is not work for me, it's my pleasure; it's my life. So why should I stop? If something is pleasurable and exciting and rewarding, why should one stop?

  Gunther Schuller

  Hate, Stop Hating, Pleasure

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• I fear I shall never be...good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, collecting old Japan, and writing a journey to China or the Moon.

  William Thomas Beckford

  Writing, Moon, Journey

  Letter to Catherine, Lady Hamilton, April 1781; cited from "The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill" by Lewis Melville, London: William Heinemann, (p. 92), 1910.

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• The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.

  John Cage

  Silence, Sound, Integrating

  Pierre Boulez, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, John Cage, Robert Samuels (1995). “The Boulez-Cage Correspondence”, p.38, Cambridge University Press

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• Playing is much, much harder than composing in my opinion, becoming a player. If you want to be a player for all your life either you decide not to do it professionally and just enjoy it and just do it every weekend, but if you want to be a professional musician- hardest thing I could imagine and I really wasn't capable of doing it.

  John Powell

  Weekend, Player, Want

  Source: collider.com

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• The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.

  Gertrude Stein

  Composition

  Gertrude Stein (2012). “Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein”, p.516, Vintage

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• Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man taken by himself.

  Matthew Arnold

  Taken, Men, Numbers

  "Democracy" (1861)

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• Composing means you have a beginning, middle and end and a fluidity to what you're doing.

  Sandra Bullock

  Mean, Beginning Middle And End, Fluidity

  "Gravity Press Conference | Alfonso Cuaron & Sandra Bullock". www.frontrowreviews.co.uk. November 7, 2013.

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• La dernie'  re chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage, est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la premie'  re. The last thing one discovers in composing a work iswhat to put first.

  Blaise Pascal

  Lasts, Firsts

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• Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.

  Martin Fowler

  Thinking, Symphony, People

  "Evolutionary Design". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. November 18, 2002.

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• If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment.

  James Dyson

  Writing, Heart, Emotional

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• Dad, once an aspiring architect, drove his own catering truck to feed factory workers in downtown Los Angeles, and mom, with a Mensa IQ and mathematical gifts, served as a bookkeeper and worked in a grocery store while pursuing her calling in music: playing piano and composing songs. Perhaps in a way, part of my drive was to complete their unfulfilled ambitions and dreams, but in my own way.

  Dan Millman

  Mom, Dream, Song

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

  Casey Abrams

  Fun, Crazy, Track

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