Ned Rorem Quotes

#1. Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.

Ned Rorem

#2. Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.

Ned Rorem

#3. Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out, while Romantic grows from outside in.

Ned Rorem

#4. If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.

Ned Rorem

#5. Don't be too dismissive of children. While it's true that few children are artists, all artists are children.

Ned Rorem

#6. Anyone can be gay - it's no accomplishment - but only I can be me.

Ned Rorem

#7. The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.

Ned Rorem

#8. Nothing is a waste that makes a memory.

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#9. Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

Ned Rorem

#10. I don't go to concerts much. I've heard everything. When I do go to movies, I walk out half the time. As for literature, I've read everything.

Ned Rorem

#11. The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of.

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#12. Why, after all, must everyone like music? That they are missing something is just the lover's opinion.

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#13. Quarrels in France strengthen a love affair, in America they end it.

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#14. To start writing about your life is, from one standpoint, to stop living it. You must avoid adventures today so as to make time for registering those of yesterday.

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#15. Love is a mystery which, when solved, evaporates. The same holds for music.

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#16. There are no fascinating people, only their works are fascinating.

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#17. If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest ... she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists. Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death.

Ned Rorem

#18. Art means to dare - and to have been right.

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#19. Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.

Ned Rorem

#20. Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet.

Ned Rorem

#21. As a lifelong pacifist, Quaker, and a gay man, I despair that gays and lesbians are expending energy trying to get into the military when they should be using that same energy getting rid of the military completely.

Ned Rorem

#22. Greatness is not the effect of which inspiration is the cause. We are all inspired, but we are all not great.

Ned Rorem

#23. Sooner or later you've heard all your best friends have to say. Then comes the tolerance of real love.

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#24. To see itself through, music must have idea or magic ... Music with neither dies young though rich.

Ned Rorem

#25. The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience.

Ned Rorem

#26. It's not evil that's ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.

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#27. If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist.

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#28. Divine fires do not blaze each day, but an artist functions in their afterglow hoping for their recurrence.

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#29. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.

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#30. In music the present is extended.

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#31. If you read reviews of concerts, the word 'creative' comes up all the time. However, performers playing music usually aren't creative. Critics might say they are, but they're just playing another persons work. They didn't create it.

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#32. Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes. Frigidaires are perfect. Beauty limps. My frigidaire has had to be replaced.

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#33. So far as musical pedagogy is concerned -
And by extension of musical creation -
Nadia Boulanger is the most influential person who ever lived

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#34. All men are forced into one of two categories: those with eleven fingers and those without.

Ned Rorem

#35. The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty.

Ned Rorem

#36. An artist doesn't necessarily have deeper feelings than other people, but he can express these feelings. He is like everyone else-only more so! He speaks with a Formal Sigh.

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#37. The Great don't innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, they leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they've manured. A deceptive memory may be the key to their originality.

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#38. Intelligence is silence, truth is being invisible. But what a racket I make in declaring this.

Ned Rorem

#39. Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future.

Ned Rorem

#40. Composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

Ned Rorem