Top 100 Quotes About Composing
#1. Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness.
Walter J. Ong
#2. Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for "making poetry" is the same as the verb "to breathe."
Such tidbits of ethnic lore delighted Amanda, and she vowed from that time onward she would try to regulate each breath as if she were composing a poem.
Tom Robbins
#3. Composing gives me great pleasure ... there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.
Clara Schumann
#4. When I am composing, I try to clear my mind of having to publish, or having to sell a book or find readers. That kind of thinking gets in the way.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#5. My friend is composing an epic in Byronic stanzas entitled "True History of Autua, Last Moriori" & interrupts my journal writing to ask what rhymes with what: - "Streams of blood"? "Themes of mud"? "Robin Hood"?
David Mitchell
#6. Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man taken by himself.
Matthew Arnold
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.
B.F. Skinner
#12. 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
#13. The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand ... We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.
Jean Cocteau
#14. There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.
Tom Robbins
#15. Composing music is what makes me happy.
L.Joe
#16. 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
#17. When the Second World War broke out, I felt that everyone must do his share, and I began composing songs and marches for the front. But soon events assumed such gigantic and far-reaching scope as to demand larger canvasses.
Sergei Prokofiev
#18. Composing means you have a beginning, middle and end and a fluidity to what you're doing.
Sandra Bullock
#19. I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.
Henry Flynt
#20. All these tales of people sitting down and composing symphonies just as though they were writing a letter are very much exaggerated; at least, it isn't that way in my work.
George Gershwin
#21. A union of the States is a union of the men composing them, from whence a national character result to the whole,
Rufus King
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. The song we're composing already exists in potential. Our work is to find it.
Steven Pressfield
#25. I've been writing and composing songs since I was 5 years old.
Olivia D'Abo
#26. 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
#27. I could create music that sounded as strange as any electronic music, because you see, my opinion about electronic music is that the real composer is the guy who invented the instrument. Pressing buttons is not composing. Composing is about creating something.
Glenn Branca
#28. Even when not in the act of writing Muscatine a letter, I was often composing one in my mind, situating the words just so, plunking one here, then one there, gauging how to sound worthy of his regard.
Timothy Schaffert
#29. The several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government
Thomas Jefferson
#30. Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.
Lukas Foss
#31. I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.
George Murray
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. My mother was a classical pianist and my stepfather was an industrialist who was passionate about composing contemporary music.
Carla Bruni
#35. I'm composing more than before. I'm cutting down on conducting.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#36. Composing is sort of an intuitive act. You have to put yourself in the right frame of mind.
Howard Shore
#37. Composing a piece of music is very feminine. It is sensitive, emotional, contemplative. By comparison, doing housework is positively masculine.
Barbara Kolb
#38. The neurotic lies awake at night, composing letters to those he hates. He seldom thinks of dropping a line to those he loves.
Mignon McLaughlin
#39. One of the great advantages of cremation - apart from all sanitary conditions - lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the material elements composing the physical and astral corpses, brought about by the burning.
Annie Besant
#40. I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
Rebecca West
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.
Sydney Smith
#44. For many artists fame complements the value of creative self-expression. Ludwig van Beethoven loved composing music, but he probably would have enjoyed it less if no one ever listened to the product.
Tyler Cowen
#45. When I read something, I picture that scene in that detail. That becomes very similar to composing a photo in real life.
Sally Mann
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not.
Coco J. Ginger
#50. I think of myself of a primitivist. I have never had any of these electronic instruments and I have never had the slightest interest in using them. I use the computer as a tool, simply because it makes composing a lot faster. But I don't go on stage with a computer and make a lot of goofy sounds.
Glenn Branca
#51. When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.
Pauline Oliveros
#52. Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.
John Cage
#53. I have come up with very creative ideas that really didn't work with the song I was currently composing.
Ken Hill
#54. There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#55. The music critic Harold Schonberg goes further: Mozart, he argues, actually "developed late," since he didn't produce his greatest work until he had been composing for more than twenty years.
Malcolm Gladwell
#57. When it comes to sitting down and composing, there is no hesitation, no concern, no critics breathing fire down my neck. For me, writing a song is the purest part of all. No one can mess with that.
Rufus Wainwright
#58. What, then, are some of the shifts that have happened in our understanding of the composing process that make a focus on digital writing in the writing workshop that much more compelling?
Troy Hicks
#59. 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
#60. I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.
Bruce Cockburn
#61. The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
Donald Knuth
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. I'm trying to conduct only five months a year, and the rest will be composing time. I'm trying to spend as much as I can out of those months here in L.A., because for creative work, this is a fantastic place.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#67. 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
#68. I suppose I was affected by raw sounds and timbres more than a lot of other composers. Had I been involved with orchestral composing, I think the aspect that would have most endeared me to that field would have been the orchestration.
Wendy Carlos
#69. The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others.
Morton Feldman
#70. The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
John Cage
#71. I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.
Erin Morgenstern
#72. Matter. noun: what we're made of; the very stuff of the universe. verb: to command your contribution to the substance composing everything; to be.
Laurie Perez
#73. A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.
Kate Millett
#75. Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.
Matt Hardy
#76. [If] it were possible to watch composing in the same way that one can watch painting, if composers could have _ateliers_ as did painters, then it would be clear how superfluous the music theorist is and how he is just as harmful as the art academies.
Arnold Schoenberg
#77. Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.
Arnold Schoenberg
#78. Mystery can be overwhelming. Touching Divinity can seem like all one's atoms composing mind and body have suddenly been rearranged.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#79. Stop staring at my dick," he growled.
Oh, yes it was definitely an illusion. "Barrons loved me staring at his dick,"I informed it. "he would have been happy if I'd stared at his dick all day long, composing odes to its perfection.
Karen Marie Moning
#80. But it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an accidental collection: each was labeled as composing you and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you're not gone, you're simply taking on different forms.
David Eagleman
#81. Every day I lugged my backpack through the halls, waiting for the final bell. Then I'd race home and hole up in my room, playing the drums and the piano, composing music.
Josh Groban
#82. 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
#83. If one has never known freedom, it is easy to be blind to the gridirons composing one's cell.
Nenia Campbell
#84. There is no composing draught like the draught through the tube of a pipe.
Frederick Marryat
#85. As to writing another book on geometry [to replace Euclid] the middle ages would have as soon thought of composing another New Testament.
Augustus De Morgan
#86. Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#87. I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.
John Francis
#88. 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
#89. I knew I was going to be composing. It all makes sense in retrospect. But you don't know while you're in the process of improvising your life.
William Bolcom
#90. If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach ...
Aaron Copland
#91. The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; ... the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression.
James Madison
#92. He is a songwriter Composing notes that hold together eternity
Amena Brown
#93. Being in the studio is okay but sitting in a room by yourself composing is a discipline that takes a certain type of mind set and Tommy has a great gift for that as did the previous guy.
James Young
#94. I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.
Christopher Hitchens
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two - are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience.
Paul Di Filippo
#99. I am composing like a god, as if it simply had to be done as it has been done.
Franz Schubert
#100. 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
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