Muhly Quotes

#1. 'Neverwhere,' by Benjamin Millepied, is set to his favorite composer, Nico Muhly.

Robert Gottlieb

#2. I'm trying to phase out my availability on the phone. People call you when you're walking down the street and say the most random stuff.

Nico Muhly

#3. It takes more energy to maintain mediocrity than it takes to pursue excellence.

Matthew Kelly

#4. Every couple weeks I'll listen to Sibelius's Seventh Symphony, just to check in, to see how it's doing. It's doing OK.

Nico Muhly

#5. The score is doing a lot of work. It's like Wagner. It's like a yak carrying people.

Nico Muhly

#6. 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

#7. I'm falling into you This dream could come true And it feels so good falling into you from If You Asked Me To

Diane Warren

#8. There's nothing worse than a smartass who pretends not to understand hyperbole.

Steven Brust

#9. Writing orchestra music, you need for the emotional content to come from everyone doing everything together, adding up as it goes, a crowd mentality.

Nico Muhly

#10. Composition is interesting because, in a sense, you always have to let it go. Unless you're a true composer/performer, you're always sending a PDF and then someone else makes it. It's like instructions for a short story, faxed to every English student who's studying it.

Nico Muhly

#11. There's a lot of violence in Beethoven not explicitly suggested by the notes or in his markings, necessarily. There's just a way that it looks on the page that encourages it to be played in a certain fashion.

Nico Muhly

#12. Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth.

Walker Percy

#13. What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.

Christopher Morley

#14. With chamber music you can get people who work on the music for months, rehearsing it every day for a couple of hours, and if they get it in a different way than you do, which is entirely possible, it's not as a result of anything other than their good musicianship.

Nico Muhly

#15. Because I had been in conservatory for so long, I was jealous of my friends in bands.

Nico Muhly

#16. As a composer you want to tell musicians two completely contradictory things. You want to say, "Play exactly what I wrote, but bring your own thing to it." In a lot of ways they feel like opposites, but in a sense, my job is to cajole or encourage decisions that I approve of.

Nico Muhly

#17. In really fancy restaurants they never point to the bathroom, they just gesture toward the bathroom or they'll lead you to the bathroom. The fancier the restaurant, the less pointing there is.

Nico Muhly

#18. I'm pretty clear about what I'm capable of doing.

Nico Muhly

#19. For me the best kind of film music is liturgical music. Liturgical music is essentially a million scores for the same film.

Nico Muhly

#20. When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick, use someone else's trick, or have no trick and get a bad performance.

Nico Muhly

#21. Increasing numbers of Pagans are identifying themselves as animists or naming their worldview as animism. Some Pagans use the term animism to refer to one strand within their Paganism, while others identify it as the most appropriate label for everything they do.

Graham Harvey

#22. I think my generation is a lost generation in a way.

Nico Muhly

#23. Riding a horse is a relationship with a foreign creature, and with musicians it's a similar thing: "OK, I'm going to put something on the page that will spook you into rushing." Little games you can play.

Nico Muhly

#24. Whenever I get asked to write orchestra music or music that is for a lot of players, I try to make it a little sad.

Nico Muhly

#25. My father didn't believe in war. He said war was evil, but if it came he would revel in it like sand in a storm.

Nnedi Okorafor

#26. One good way of measuring the mood in Israel is just how alert or relaxed the guards at every restaurant entrance appear to be.

Elliott Abrams

#27. Research is not a systematic occupation but an intuitive artistic vocation.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

#28. When I was nine, I was taught to ride a surfboard in Waikiki by the beach boy Rabbit Kekai.

Susanna Moore

#29. There was a time I was no longer going to be black. I was going to be an 'intellectual.' When I was first looking around for colleges, thinking of colleges I couldn't afford to go to, I was thinking of being a philosopher. I began to understand then that much of my feelings about race were negative.

Walter Dean Myers

#30. You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

Chuck Palahniuk

#31. After slipping the condom on, he rolled on top of her, shoved her hair out of her face and held it while he got lost in those sea green eyes that, in a darkened room, shined bright.
He wanted her. And it wasn't just the sex. He wanted the whole nutty package.

Adrienne Giordano

#32. Like the Phoenix, we can observe in our own lives that disintegration brings with it transformation and rebirth.

Donna Labermeier

#33. Climate change has been associated so much with a peaceful mentality - obviously peace and love are good, but we need to think about climate as a threat to survival.

Margaret D. Klein

#34. I didn't entertain the idea that my music would ever become available in any of the ways that I had previously known music to be available.

Nico Muhly