Top 100 Quotes About Composing
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. [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
#4. Final Satyagraha is inconceivable without an honorable peace between the several communities composing the Indian nation.
Mahatma Gandhi
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. My two great loves when I'm shooting are working with great actors and composing images.
Tom Hooper
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Poetry is composing, you are writing words to move the world like music.
Atticus
#18. There are only
two types of composers:
composing composers
and decomposing composers.
Lera Auerbach
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.
Blaise Pascal
#22. When I sit behind that electronic drum, it dominates me; there is no innovation in composing music like that.
Sivamani
#23. 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
#24. However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.
Gyorgy Ligeti
#25. Yes, sampling has changed not just my way of playing and composing.
Klaus Schulze
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.
John Cage
#29. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.
Gustav Mahler
#38. And I decide to stop inwardly composing the feminist world court's prosecutorial summation to the jury.
Laurie Viera Rigler
#39. 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
#41. I love composing and writing music and dancing and performing and conceptualizing creatively for visual mediums. I love to create.
Michael Jackson
#42. I run around so much that I finally reasoned that composing is the one musical endeavour which you can do anywhere, anytime.
Andre Previn
#43. 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
#44. You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.
Maurice Ravel
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. In England, life is a long process of composing oneself ...
Shirley Hazzard
#56. 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
#57. The first-century Jews who wrote about Jesus had already made up their minds about who he was. They were constructing a theological argument about the nature and function of Jesus as Christ, not composing a historical biography about a human being.
Reza Aslan
#58. The government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the reflux of the individuals composing it. The government that is ahead of the people will be inevitably dragged down to their level, as the government that is behind them will in the long run be dragged up.
Samuel Smiles
#59. Composing is what I love most from what I do. Each genre has a unique expression that you cannot supplant with another. All the records co-inspire each other though they are not tied conceptually in any way to another.
Serj Tankian
#60. The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.
Albert Einstein
#61. The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
#62. When Debussy was seeming to get nowhere with an opera he was composing, he put it this way: "I spent my days pursuing the nothingness -le rien - it creates." My job is to create that void, that rien.
Hunting knife
Haruki Murakami
#63. If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.
Simon Rattle
#64. I've been composing music all my life and if I'd been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.
Anthony Hopkins
#65. Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.
Edgar Allan Poe
#66. The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.
John Stuart Mill
#67. All of a sudden it hit me - If there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion. After all, there are melodic figures, why can't there be figures of motion?
Len Lye
#68. The mad is either insane or he is composing verses.
Horace
#69. Watching my stepfather and mother working in the industry - acting and composing - and seeing firsthand how difficult it is to achieve a successful career in the theater, I thought it might be safer to go to art school with the aim of becoming a painter.
Juliet Rylance
#70. 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
#71. When I'm composing a scene for the first time, I try to imitate my character. The less critical distance the better - particularly when they're acting badly.
Jonathan Dee
#72. I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.
Franz Schubert
#73. 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
#74. When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.
Tom Glazer
#75. My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.
Alex North
#76. Starting a new chapter is much like composing the perfect photograph. You must ensure the proper components are there. You may throw out the extra, but with out the key elements the story goes untold.
Faith Tilley Johnson
#77. It never occurred to me that there was anything odd about writing my own music, and so I used to just jot down little ditties and things like that. And it was only in later years I suppose when I was about nine or so, that I realised there was this thing called composing.
Richard Meale
#78. 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
#79. The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures." There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path.
Michel De Certeau
#80. While it is true that Frank had a great sense of humor, he was also very serious about composing music. In reality there are only a handful of skilled players who can play his most complex pieces. It takes a lot of patience to learn and requires a fantastic memory.
Dweezil Zappa
#81. I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, "slow" would be the word.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#82. 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
#83. Damn it, I'm angry now. I do believe life is loss, I do, but my suffering-to-words-ratio was out of control: lying around composing nothing but these - righteous arias, month after month, these tawdry special pleas.
Gwendoline Riley
#84. 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
#85. Our individual consciousness is actually part of a larger system. There are many levels of consciousness, and the creativity used in composing the music comes from another level that is not purely personal.
Eyvind Kang
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I don't meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing and composing as meditative acts.
Steve Swallow
#89. Composing gives me a chance to work in multiple dimensions and helps me pare down my melodies into what is essential. Learning new skills has always energized me and scoring has opened up a world of sonic possibilities.
Liz Phair
#90. 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
#91. I enjoy the process of composing music. The first time I hear a song, it has to bring a smile to my lips. You have to tap your feet and be able to sing the song.
Salman Khan
#92. 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
#93. I just want to continue developing as a musician. I love playing. I also want to be more involved in composing, doing my own thing, I hope to continue to be in different situations that I can nurture and that will nurture me.
Vinnie Colaiuta
#95. Composing is not a profession. It is a maniaa harmless madness.
Arthur Honegger
#96. Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.
Brenda Ueland
#97. My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.
Brian Eno
#98. 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
#99. Ever since Two Daughters I've been composing my own music.
Satyajit Ray
#100. I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.
John Irving
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