Composing's Quotes

#1. Composing's not voluntary, you know. There's no choice, you're not free. You're landed with an idea and you have responsibility to that idea.

Harrison Birtwistle

#2. I've always felt that the game itself is pretty much a melody and I am there to provide the lyrics. You want the lyrics to match the melody, because if you are composing a song or recording a song, it's cacophonous if they don't match.

Al Michaels

#3. Composing is just another exciting thing. It's as exciting as being in a band. It's kind of like joining a new band for three months.

James Iha

#4. The process of composing the film score for each movie is completely different. They all have their own personality and their own completely different life, but there's never been a formula. Each time, it's a new thing.

Trevor Rabin

#5. surfing, writing, composing, and programming deep into the night, like it's the early 1980s with the hue of poison-green CRT illuminating the room, Nike running shoes on the floor, hair metal poster on the door, and everything is infinite, made of fibre optics and floppy disks . . .

Mike Walker

#6. In a way, composing on the melodic level is an expression of a melodic truth, almost like a geometric truth. If it has clarity, other people will recognize it. There's no way of isolating it in a gallery on a white wall and saying, "This is a work of art. This is a mathematical proof."

Eyvind Kang

#7. Writer's Disease: About ninety per cent of your time is wasted on totally pointless and distracting activity, and only about ten per cent is actually spent dreaming up and composing and shaping and honing all those wonderful, exciting, soul-stirring excuses for not having got anything written.

Jem Roberts

#8. The world I live in is composing a magnum opus to the heart-stopping, outrageously unbelievable unconditional love and acceptance of God that crushes and demolishes the vestiges of self-righteous "us and them." It's

Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

#9. When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write. Quickly say what is in your mind; never hesitate a moment.

Robert Hass

#10. That's how I always try to start my thoughts. I write them down first, eventually it turns into a poem, and if I feel like composing something to it, then I do that.

Benjamin Clementine

#11. From an outsider's perspective, it's amazing what [Clint Eastwood] does. If he's not directing a film, he's acting in it, or rather he's composing the music for that film. His commitment to what he does is astounding for all of us to witness. It's inspiring, actually.

Leonardo DiCaprio

#12. When topics are complex and meaty, don't create a never-ending email thread. It's amazing how much time people waste composing and reading carefully-worded essays, when a 5 minute in-person chat would resolve the whole thing.

Justin Rosenstein

#13. I think of improvising as composing - fo me it's all about playing melodies. When I improvise, there's not a lot of real thinking going on, per se - it's more like riding a wave. and I know how to stand on the board

Robben Ford

#14. I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

Gordon Getty

#15. Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.

Martin Fowler

#16. We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches.

Anna Akhmatova

#17. I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it's not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out.

John Zorn

#18. I love making music, I love composing on my computer, just making crazy ethnic slack orchestral tracks, that's one of my fun things.

Casey Abrams

#19. When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

Matsuo Basho

#20. If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Simon Rattle

#21. I did quite a lot of the arranging, fitting different sections together, tempo changes, all sorts of things like that. I actually acted as a bridge between Robert and Ian. Not so much composing, rather presenting musical ideas at each rehearsal.

Michael Giles

#22. In England, life is a long process of composing oneself ...

Shirley Hazzard

#23. I fear I shall never be ... good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, collecting old Japan, and writing a journey to China or the Moon.

William Thomas Beckford

#24. To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

James Horner

#25. To visualize an image (in whole or in part) is to see clearly in the mind prior to exposure, a continuous projection from composing the image through the final print.

Ansel Adams

#26. I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

Thom Gunn

#27. If one has never known freedom, it is easy to be blind to the gridirons composing one's cell.

Nenia Campbell

#28. Charlie started crying, in the convulsive, soundless way that men do. "Don't you understand," he said after composing himself, "that's a funeral dirge for the first wave." We all thought about that, the many lives lost before we even opened our eyes this morning.

Suzanne Hayes

#29. It is always the same with me; only when I experience something do I compose, and only when composing do I experience! After all, a musician's nature can hardly be expressed in words.

Gustav Mahler

#30. Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.

T. S. Eliot

#31. I think I've done more recording in the past 10 years than most people, but it's all been directed toward film composing and soundtracks. Just the same, it's been great.

Stanley Clarke

#32. Mystery can be overwhelming. Touching Divinity can seem like all one's atoms composing mind and body have suddenly been rearranged.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#33. You didn't take part, Benjamin?" Gunther asked, as he passed me a plate of cheese and cold meat.
"My brother doesn't play games," said Paul. "He's an aesthete. He sat by the window all afternoon with a funny look on his face: probably composing a tone poem.

Jonathan Coe

#34. One of the major aspects of film composing is that it's not so much a musical thing as it is communicating your ideas with the director, who often does not come from a musical background.

Marco Beltrami

#35. 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.

James Dyson

#36. I don't hate work, composing is not work for me, it's my pleasure; it's my life. So why should I stop? If something is pleasurable and exciting and rewarding, why should one stop?

Gunther Schuller

#37. It's not instant composing; it's not following any kind of a formula. All you do is hear music in your head and reproduce it.

Lennie Tristano

#38. Perhaps the most striking of all the on-demand services is Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which allows customers to post any "human intelligence task", from flagging objectionable content on websites to composing text messages; workers on the site choose what to do according to task and price.

Anonymous

#39. I can play the flute. Music was my favourite A-level, and I used to love composing my and stylising my voice to sound like 90's singing sensation Tori Amos.

Erin O'Connor

#40. I would love to compose more fantasy music, whether it's for a film or a game. That genre has so much opportunity for harmonic experimentation, not to mention all the interesting instruments that become available when composing music for alien species and other worlds.

Jason Graves

#41. My urge, when I go to the store, is to buy everything. And it's the same when I'm composing. My first instinct is basically to bring the whole store home, and not make a decision about how things play out.

Nico Muhly

#42. I cannot learn creation from other people; I've got to do it myself. Now, honestly, I regret not studying - I don't know about harmonies, or anything, so if I'm composing a song, it's really hard.

Psy

#43. Strasser hoped to replace the Programme of 1920. In November, he took the first steps in composing the Community's own draft programme. It advocated a racially integrated German nation at the heart of a central European customs union, the basis of a united states of Europe.

Ian Kershaw

#44. Miss Bennet, I am quite aware of your superior talent for cutting down the Lord's forsaken flock. I merely mean to spare your gown.'
Thank you,' said Elizabeth, composing herself, 'but I should rather my gown be soiled than my honor.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#45. I love directing more than anything in the world, and I love being in the editing room. I love cutting. When I'm shooting, I cut it in my head anyway. That's not to say that it always turns out that way, but you have a sense when you're composing a sequence or a scene how you want it to look anyway.

Hart Bochner

#46. And if Henry Higgins is not the most reprehensible character ever written for the stage, that's only because somewhere, somehow, someone is composing a musical biography of Ronald Reagan

Steve Kluger

#47. He's probably out there in the hallway right now, composing bad poetry in his head." Michi cleared her throat, her voice taking on a breathless lilt:
"Pale Fox's Daughter,
Her cherry lips haunt my dreams.
Something, something, breasts ...

Jay Kristoff

#48. I think it's important to be sincere. And I could be the most sincere just staying in [my] mother language actually. And that's the reason why I stay composing and writing in French.

Stromae

#49. I'm always composing and trying to learn more about the business. In today's market, it's more important than ever to be self-sufficient as an artist. I am in law school and that has helped me in so many ways. It's cool to know what I'm signing and I hope to be able to advise other artists.

Antoniette Costa

#50. Frye's influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence.

Harold Bloom

#51. As Jung says more clearly of Christ: This Gnostic Christ ... symbolizes man's original unity and exalts it as the saving goal of his development. By composing

C. G. Jung

#52. Hello, Scarlet," said Maha, composing herself enough to smile. "Ze'ev failed to mention he was in love with you." Scarlet could feel her cheeks turning as red as her hair. Thorne

Marissa Meyer

#53. However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#54. Composing is a natural fit. As far as the creative process goes, I'd rather do this than anything else, by far. Something different happened to me when I started to write music to images. It was a feeling of excitement and connection and a sense of being in the right place that I never had before.

James Newton Howard

#55. When I sit behind that electronic drum, it dominates me; there is no innovation in composing music like that.

Sivamani

#56. The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.

Blaise Pascal

#57. There are people who must spend huge amounts of time composing these online diatribes against me, all about how disgusting and terrible I am and how no one should ever read my books, and it's not enough for them to hate me, they can't stand the fact that ANYONE likes me!

Poppy Z. Brite

#58. As important as color is to a painting, or wings to a bird. Music injects vibrancy to film and makes it soar!

Gerard De Marigny

#59. There are only
two types of composers:
composing composers
and decomposing composers.

Lera Auerbach

#60. Poetry is composing, you are writing words to move the world like music.

Atticus

#61. I wrote a lot of software to do various kinds of special things, and I loved the idea of composing pieces in an electronic studio.

Paul Lansky

#62. There is, however, a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like part of the act.

Tom Robbins

#63. Was that a personal call, Cammie?" he asked with a shrewd glance. I had a brief moment of panic before composing myself. "Yes. It was my gynecologist. He wanted to discuss my latest pap smear. Do you want to know how the cells on my cervix are doing?

R.S. Grey

#64. My two great loves when I'm shooting are working with great actors and composing images.

Tom Hooper

#65. Yes, sampling has changed not just my way of playing and composing.

Klaus Schulze

#66. We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?

Aldous Huxley

#67. I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

David Antin

#68. To be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment ...

Joseph Epstein

#69. Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#70. A lot of young girls don't realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven't thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing.

Rhianna Pratchett

#71. Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

T. S. Eliot

#72. My mother also had us take piano lessons, and this had a similar effect. I hated those lessons, but I now play regularly for pleasure and have even tried my hand at composing.

Robert B. Laughlin

#73. Final Satyagraha is inconceivable without an honorable peace between the several communities composing the Indian nation.

Mahatma Gandhi

#74. [Happily broken] arms unlocked. Eyes wide open.
Eager. Torn apart. Heart explosive.
Fingers composing [Happily broken].
Come in, come in. I am ready. I am open.
Happy to be open [Happily broken].

Coco J. Ginger

#75. Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#76. The next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the power of quiet.

Susan Cain

#77. What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.

Gustav Mahler

#78. The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.

Gertrude Stein

#79. Composing is improvisation slowed down.

Wayne Shorter

#80. In the back of my mind, I'm composing a tweet to make this funny somehow. Hashtag #awkwardparentmoments. It would probably trend on Twitter. I want to laugh at this to make the whole situation less real.

Janet Gurtler

#81. In a crazy way, writing is a lot like any kind of very complex game - like chess, where you have the knowledge as you're composing all of the ramifications of each move, of each choice you make.

Adam Ross

#82. You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.

Maurice Ravel

#83. Every bit of theorizing I've ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing.

George Perle

#84. I run around so much that I finally reasoned that composing is the one musical endeavour which you can do anywhere, anytime.

Andre Previn

#85. I love composing and writing music and dancing and performing and conceptualizing creatively for visual mediums. I love to create.

Michael Jackson

#86. Poetry is composing for the breath.

Peter Davison

#87. Gold and silver grow, and so does every other kind of metal, the same as the hair upon my head, or the wheat in the field; they do not grow as fast, but they are all the time composing or decomposing

Brigham Young

#88. And I decide to stop inwardly composing the feminist world court's prosecutorial summation to the jury.

Laurie Viera Rigler

#89. It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

Vladimir Nabokov

#90. Since I first fell in love with choral music when I was 18 and began composing at 21, I've been listening to these recordings of British choirs. I just fell in love with that sound - that pure, clean, pristine sound - and I think it's probably been the biggest influence on my sound.

Eric Whitacre

#91. Talentless and incompetent as I am, there are two things I can do, and two things only: walk, with my own two feet; compose, composing my poems.

Santoka Taneda

#92. Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.

Benjamin Britten

#93. Whatever you do ... put your heart and soul into it!

S. Truett Cathy

#94. The obscure, unexplainable aspect of the writing process is about how some rhymes appear in your head. It often feels more like tuning in to some kind of channel than composing words in your mind.

Sahara Sanders

#95. You haven't time to think about the composition. In working directly from nature, the painter ends up by simply aiming at an effect, and not composing the picture at all; and he soon becomes monotonous.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

#96. Composing mortals with immortal fire.

W. H. Auden

#97. Voltaire was also there, fleeing a royal arrest warrant, and working as a kind of one-man eighteenth-century USO show during the siege, offering bons mots and brandy between bouts of battle and composing odes to the military men. The

Tom Reiss

#98. The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.

John Cage

#99. I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.

Steve Erickson

#100. When the music comes, you try to see it shining between your eyes. Like threads stretched taut and the notes as colored beads threaded on. When you get very good, it's as if you can see inside the music, through it. You bring the music alive, bring it into being. As if you're the one composing.

Anna Smaill