Composition Quotes - Page 18

• I've been a teacher at the college level, in composition mostly, and I've been an editor on magazines.

  Jane Haddam

  Teacher, College, Editors

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• We are God's productions, His compositions.

  David Jeremiah

  Productions

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• One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

  Alfred de Vigny

  Hands, Two, Public Opinion

  Alfred de Vigny (1923). “Cinq Mars”

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• Composition is a side issue. Its role in my selection of photographs is a negative one at best. By which I mean that the fascination of a photograph is not in its eccentric composition but in what it has to say: its information content. And, on the other hand, composition always also has its own fortuitous rightness.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Mean, Issues

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

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• At one point [Cardew] taught himself to play guitar simply in order to take part in the performance in a composition by Boulez, which is a little like saying he learned Danish to read Kiekegaard.

  Morton Feldman

  Guitar, Order, Play

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• There are few gardens that can be left alone. A few years of neglect and only the skeleton of a garden can be traced. . . . Japanese artists working with a few stones and sand four hundred years ago achieved strangely lasting compositions. However there, too, but for the hands that have piously raked the white sand into patterns and controlled the spread of moss and lichens, little would remain.

  Russell Page

  Garden, Artist, Skeletons

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• Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography.

  Gerhard Richter

  Photography, Art, Mean

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• If somebody had told me when I was starting composition in Helsinki in the '70s that I would end up in L.A. and to describe that journey, those 17 years with the philharmonic and building the hall and this and that, I would have said, "This is a fairy tale of the first order."

  Esa-Pekka Salonen

  Journey, Order, Years

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I see now our fireside formed into a groupe, no one member of which has a fibre in their composition which can ever produce any jarring or jealousies among us. No irregular passions, no dangerous bias, which may render problematical the future fortunes and happiness of our descendants.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Happiness, Passion, May

  Thomas Jefferson, Barbara B. Oberg (1950). “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 29: 1 March 1796 to 31 December 1797”, p.424, Princeton University Press

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• It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.... They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry sheds no tears "such as Angels weep," but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.

  William Wordsworth

  Angel, Blood, Differences

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• I prefer things that are private, so I love recording and I love making films, as a filmmaker, because it uses every bit of what you have experienced or know, whether it's graphics composition, decorating, psychology, storytelling, or whatever it is. It's a wonderful thing.

  Barbra Streisand

  Psychology, Use, Wonderful

  Source: collider.com

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• Usually I'm thinking about the palette. I'm thinking about the color for the most part, then I'll start thinking about composition and movement.

  Steven Soderbergh

  Thinking, Color, Movement

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Composition and choreography were always very important to me and I choreographed for my earliest training.

  Jack Waters

  Training, Important, Choreography

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction.

  William Zinsser

  Events, Looks, Calling

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• We may say with truth and meaning, that governments are more or less republican, as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition; and believing as I do, that the mass of the citizens is the safest depository of their own rights and especially that the evils flowing from the duperies of the people are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents, I am a friend to that composition of government which has in it the most of this ingredient.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Believe, Rights, Government

  Thomas Jefferson, H. A. Washington (2011). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private”, p.608, Cambridge University Press

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• One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought.

  Jacques Barzun

  Reading, Writing, Cutting

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• People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.

  Victor Hugo

  Art, Law, People

  Victor Hugo (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Victor Hugo (Illustrated)”, p.12495, Delphi Classics

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• So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,--both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT--as his RESISTANCE.

  Laurence Sterne

  Men, Half, Earth

  Laurence Sterne (1849). “The Works of Laurence Sterne: Containing the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Sermons, Letters, &c. With a Life of the Author Written by Himself”, p.228

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• The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.

  Voltaire

  Tragedy, Testicles

  When asked 'why no woman has ever written a tolerable tragedy', in a letter from Lord Byron to John Murray, 2 April 1817

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• A person who chooses to die or to risk death demonstrates that there are values, principles, maxims, that are more valuable to him than is life itself. In short, he places his immortal self above his mortal self. Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Writing, Self, Risk

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• The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

  John Fahey

  Opening Up, Opening, Unconscious

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• There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.

  Billy Collins

  Thinking, Goes On, Unconscious

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". "PBS Newshour", www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

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• I have never doubted the importance of melody. I like melody very much, and I consider it the most important element in music, and I labour many years on the improvement of its quality in my compositions.

  Sergei Prokofiev

  Years, Important, Quality

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• I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the composition-ally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative.

  David Shields

  Allies, Narrative, Honest

  David Shields (2010). “Reality Hunger”, p.115, Vintage

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• Ambrose Phillips . . . who had the honor of bringing into fashion a species of composition which has been called, after his name, Namby Pamby.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Fashion, Names, Honor

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