Famous quotes by Composers

"A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance"

"In Evita I wasn't really hugely involved with it. I gave a little bit of help but they needed a bit of technical help on the movie and so some of my music people went in at the end of the movie and helped out with it"

"Here's the truth. The proposed top rate of income tax is not 50 per cent. It is 50 per cent plus 1.5 per cent national insurance paid by employees plus 13.3 per cent paid by employers. That's not 50 per cent. Two years from now, Britain will have the highest tax rate on earned income of any developed country"

"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"

"Although I enjoyed writing Film Music it was always a means to an end, in that it enabled me to keep a wife and family and write my classical music, which has always been my passion"

"I've given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself"

"If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song"

"By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow"

"We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it"

"The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas"

"Wherever the fish are, that's where we go"

"One of the things I particularly enjoyed doing was taking raw sound from locations during the film, like the candy machine, and writing pieces of music to go with them, which is totally unnecessary within the context of the film, because they have their own logic"

"Well, rather than to give you my impression on Los Angeles, per se, my older sister's husband is and American, therefore I have a pretty good idea of the, perhaps the characteristics of Americans in general"

"Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes"

"I wish I could score everything for horns"

"And it's very strange, but I think there is something very common - not only in Celtic music - but there is a factor or element in Celtic music that is similar in music that we find in Japan, the United States, Europe, and even China and other Asian countries"

"He may have hair upon his chest but, sister, so has Lassie"

"Improvised music involves a lot of intuition and I like developing intuition"

"Destiny smiles upon me but without making me the least bit happier"

"I hope you will no longer accuse me of a lack of delicacy. as I now count on your understanding"

"I did all kinds of things in order to earn a living"

"I found a greater identity with my own emotions in the Armenian culture as I grew older, as well as from the beginning, although I didn't know anything about it"

"One of the aspects of form that I have been very interested in is stasis - the concept of form which is not so directional in time, not so much climactic form, but rather form which allows time, to stand still"

"I no longer limit myself"

"An artist's sphere of influence is the world"

"Human nerves quickly get accustomed to the most unusual conditions and circumstances and I noticed that quite a number of men actually fell asleep from sheer exhaustion in the trenches, in spite of the roaring of the cannon about us and the whizzing of shrapnel over our heads"

"I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear"

"I think everything should happen at halfway to dawn. That's when all the heads of government should meet. I think everybody would fall in love"

"My favorite work is The Full Monty because I got an Oscar for it. But it was really hard work at the time. Sometimes comedy is not a bundle of laughs to actually do"

"The room where I am lodging is stupendous. Thank God I am as fit as a fiddle"