Top 53 John Williams Quotes
#1. ...everything you say is a fact, but none of it is true
John Williams
#2. So I must be locked up, where I can be safely irresponsible, where I can do no harm.
John Williams
#3. A man may live like a fool for a year, and become wise in a day.
John Williams
#4. ...and he wondered if he appeared as ludicrous to others as he did to himself.
John Williams
#5. I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.
John Williams
#6. As a youngster, I never dreamed there could be a career actually earning a living writing music.
John Williams
#8. she had never been alone to care for her own self one day of her life, nor could it ever have occurred to her that she might become responsible for the well- being of another.
John Williams
#9. We need not forgive ourselves," he (Augustus) said. "It has been a marriage. It has been better than most.
John Williams
#10. You mustn't give it up," he said, and his voice took on an urgency that he could not understand. "No matter how hard it will seem sometimes, you mustn't give it up. It's too good for you to give it up. Oh, it's good, there's no doubt of it.
John Williams
#11. a quotation from the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as an epigraph for Stoner: "A hero is one who wants to be himself." In
John Williams
#13. He felt both shame and pride, and over it all a bitter disappointment, in himself and in the time and circumstance that made him possible.
John Williams
#14. For me, there is a strong family connection to Boston and anything connected to Boston, which includes Fenway.
John Williams
#16. They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.
John Williams
#17. There are occasionally eureka moments - off the top of my head, maybe Darth Vader's theme, you know, the imperial march.
John Williams
#20. The coroner announced heart failure as the cause of death, but William Stoner always felt that in a moment of anger and despair Sloane had willed his heart to cease, as if in a last mute gesture of love and contempt for a world that had betrayed him so profoundly that he could not endure in it.
John Williams
#21. He continued, "I just want to say that your paper was the best discussion I know of the subject, and I'm grateful that you volunteered to give it.
John Williams
#23. but his long thin fingers moved with grace and persuasion, as if giving to the words a shape that his voice could not.
John Williams
#24. Working in Hollywood for the orchestra world is a very time consuming and laborious job.
John Williams
#25. Some kids, for some reason, it just doesn't click in the classroom as they need it to. We have college coaches talk to them, former high school athletes, motivational speakers, teachers, principals.
John Williams
#26. So the bed that had been the arena of their passion became the support of her illness.
John Williams
#27. And we have come out of this, at least, with ourselves. We know that we are - what we are.
John Williams
#29. He is a man like any other ... he will become what he will become, out of the force of his person and the accident of his fate.
John Williams
#30. When you think about Boston, Harvard and M.I.T. are the brains of the city, and its soul might be Faneuil Hall or the State House or the Old Church. But I think the pulsing, pounding heart of Boston is Fenway Park.
John Williams
#31. I, over the years, have always felt more comfortable if I could go into a projection room and look at a film and not really know what to expect. If you read the script first, you form all kinds of preconceptions about how things look, what the location's like, what the actors are like.
John Williams
#33. There's a very basic human, non-verbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression. It doesn't have to do with body movements, it doesn't have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual.
John Williams
#34. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.
John Williams
#35. Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.
John Williams
#36. I'm happy to be busy. I'm happy to have a wonderful family.
John Williams
#37. The possibility has occurred to me that the proper condition of man, which is to say that condition in which he is most admirable, may not be that prosperity, peace, and harmony which I labored to give to Rome." He has founded his empire, in other words, on a misconception. This
John Williams
#39. A chap can't pick the way he'll die, or we'd all do better at it.
John Williams
#40. I always wrote music for my friends, but my focus was on playing piano. I didn't think I'd be quite good enough to be a soloist, but I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could work as a player, a teacher.
John Williams
#41. I find that musically, looking back, I have learned much more from those relationships, people I have bumped into that I have admired, that's the way I feel musically I have learned most in life.
John Williams
#42. Horace once told me that laws were powerless against the private passions of the human heart, and only he who has no power over it, such as the poet or the philosopher, may persuade the human spirit to virtue.
John Williams
#43. She was an only child, and loneliness was one of the earliest conditions of her life.
John Williams
#44. There was a perception that the emerging-market problems aren't over and concern that may Brazil devalue.
John Williams
#45. As a young pianist in Hollywood, I began orchestrating for others, and I just felt really comfortable doing that.
John Williams
#46. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire...
John Williams
#47. Through it all he continued to teach and study, though he sometimes felt that he hunched his back futilely against the driving storm and cupped his hands uselessly around the dim flicker of his last poor match.
John Williams
#48. Later, William Stoner could not remember how he learned these things, that first afternoon and early evening at Josiah Claremont's house; for the time of his meeting was blurred and formal, like the figured tapestry on the stair wall off the foyer.
John Williams
#49. He was gripped by what he could think of only as numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with.
John Williams
#50. So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it's gratifying to have something you have done linger in people's memories.
John Williams
#51. I was never that into the movies. Never. Even as a youngster. I became interested in movie music only because of the studio orchestras in Hollywood.
John Williams
#52. There is no proof that carbon dioxide is causing or precedes global warming ... All indications are that the minor warming cycle finished in 2001 and that Arctic ice melting is related to cyclical orbit-tilt-axis changes in earth's angle to the sun.
John Williams
#53. The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.
John Williams
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