Quotes on Composing Music

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes", And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be "No."

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

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.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music.

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.