Top 100 Quotes About Composition
#1. As far as favorite 'overall package' record of all time, I'd have to say 'My Girl' by The Temptations. I like everything about it, not only the composition - but the arrangement, the production, the lead vocals, the background vocals, the horns, the strings. That one I listen to over and over again.
Paul Shaffer
#2. The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem's overall form.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
#3. I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.
Pat Conroy
#4. A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
Cyril Connolly
#5. Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.
Lynne Truss
#6. A photographer must be aware of and concerned about the words that accompany a picture. These words should be considered as carefully as the lighting, exposure and composition of the photograph.
Arthur Rothstein
#7. An imagined landscape, then, is a landscape not of being but of becoming: a composition not of objects and surfaces but of movements and stillness, not there to be surveyed but cast in the current of time.
Tim Ingold
#8. At one point [Cardew] taught himself to play guitar simply in order to take part in the performance in a composition by Boulez, which is a little like saying he learned Danish to read Kiekegaard.
Morton Feldman
#9. When I'm editing, it's such a tough call, and I get challenged on it all the time. You've got to go with your gut - sometimes when you look at a photograph, you just know it's the shot. Sometimes it's about the connection, or about the simplicity of the composition.
Russell James
#10. Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction.
William Zinsser
#11. There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
Billy Collins
#12. My own musical background is based in the blues, and in classical composition. I grew up listening to Muddy Waters, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Beethoven and Bach.
Frederick Lenz
#13. Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.
Diego Rivera
#14. A song is a short composition for voice and instruments. It is a piece of sung poetry set to music. It is usually only a few minutes long.
Russell Smith
#15. Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.
Edward Weston
#16. Sometimes when you record an album in the end, there are things here and there you regret production wise or in composition.
Neige
#17. I can understand not wanting to underuse Hawke, but after a while the narrative composition starts to look like a dad's testimony at a custody hearing.
Anonymous
#18. I have fallen so many times I should be a master of soil composition, and bruises.
Myself
#19. The Army (considering the irritable state it is in, its suffering and composition) is a dangerous instrument to play with.
George Washington
#20. learn the lessons before they are over. Life is a composition of series and sequence of lessons. Each lesson comes with its own lessons to learn. our failure to learn the lessons of one shall be the reasons to learn another lesson with similar lessons.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#21. It's not always easy for a father to understand the interests and ways of his son. It seems the songs of our children may be in keys we've never tried. The melody of each generation emerges from all that's gone before. Each one of us contributes in some unique way to the composition of life.
Fred Rogers
#22. Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.
Robert Hall
#23. A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.
Eric Maisel
#24. What I try to impart to a musician is to really try to practice the instrument in a really sincere way. Learn as much about music as you possibly can. Learn composition. Study to try to create compositions of your own and put your own personal touch on your music.
Roscoe Mitchell
#25. Music, art, and literature are inseparable for me. How does "composition" evolve in a music and art context? It's a question we can never answer: it only asks for more information and generates more questions.
DJ Spooky
#26. Human lives are conmposed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of an individual's life.
Milan Kundera
#27. The body enjoys a great share in our being, and has an eminent place in it. Its structure and composition, therefore, are worthy of proper consideration.
Michel De Montaigne
#28. Changes in relative ionic concentration across the postsynaptic membrane are readily effected by altering the ionic composition of the external medium.
John Eccles
#29. The connections between them were like an atonal composition, no key, no rhythm, no form.
B.V. Lawson
#30. Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may largely be conveyed - can even be enhanced - by description.
Kenneth Clark
#31. People can change the volume, the location and the composition of their income, and they can do so in response to changes in government policies.
Arthur Laffer
#32. The artistic methods of poetry, painting, photography, and writing share certain commonalities of deep composition: spirit, rhythm, thought, and scenery.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#33. She was so pitiful as she lay there on the cold, damp ground that only a heart of stone could have been unmoved. There are many hearts of that composition, however.
Elizabeth Peters
#34. Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.
Wassily Kandinsky
#35. The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.
John Fahey
#36. A composition that we do not understand or like appears to expand in time as we experience it, yet vanishes almost immediately from memory.
Curtis Roads
#37. Do not be afraid that too much labour over the composition is going to kill the spontaneity. Those who absorb and digest their experiences are, of a sudden, mountains of strength and can produce pictures with spontaneous start and finish.
John F. Carlson
#38. I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.
Andre Kertesz
#39. With composition, parts can't be shared with other objects. The life of the part is completely within the life span of the whole.
Michael Jesse Chonoles
#40. I am outraged that the Gorillaz have infringed the copyright of my song 'Time Warp,' claiming their song 'Stylo' to be an original composition.
Eddy Grant
#41. So called "composition" becomes a personal thing, to be developed along with technique, as a personal way of seeing.
Edward Weston
#42. Self-conscious artiness is fatal, but it certainly would not hurt to study composition in general. Having a basic understanding of composition would help construct a better organized image.
Berenice Abbott
#43. When newspapers are the principal vehicles of the wit and wisdom of a people, the higher graces of composition can hardly be looked for.
Frances Trollope
#44. The adventure of composition is a mystery. The muse has her ways, she hides from you, comes for you in the middle of the night, at midday, at dawn. You must believe wholeheartedly in this divine power. Its an elusive gift that can appear at any time, anywhere. Artists are in awe of it.
Mickey Hart
#46. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and ... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.
Henri Matisse
#47. I believe that everyone, some time or other, dreams that he is reading papers, books, or letters; in which case the invention prompts so readily that the mind is imposed upon, and mistakes its own suggestions for the composition of another.
Joseph Addison
#48. This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#49. Owing to thousands of generations of over-justification bred into them to keep from the maddening awareness of the true composition of the world, people had a tendency to give themselves the freedom to do whatever Shane told them, as long as it did not conflict too much with their self-preservation.
Thomm Quackenbush
#50. The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.
Paul Di Filippo
#51. Any government, of whatever composition, needs to mobilise opinion way beyond its own ranks in order to do the difficult things that it does.
Nick Clegg
#52. The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.
Lascelles Abercrombie
#53. I knew that, without killing the creative mood, I had to keep the balance between my emotional outburst and the merciless discipline of a super-personal control, thus submitting myself ti the self-imposed law of dance composition
Mary Wigman
#54. I started playing the piano, pretty much on my own, when I was 5, and I started writing music when I was 7. In fact, I won a composition award. It was a crummy little piece, but I won with it.
Maury Yeston
#55. When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet.
Brian Ferneyhough
#56. The conductor's gift does not always go hand in hand with that of composition; indeed, the union is found much more seldom than is popularly believed.
Anton Seidl
#57. I have always been willing to admit when I made a mistake. I made a mistake in my understanding of the composition of the Contras, not on my opposition to the Contra war.
Bianca Jagger
#58. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#59. When I became tired of oil painting at one stage, I used collage and this proved to be influential in the design and composition of my later works.
Myfanwy Pavelic
#60. The composition of each epoch depends upon the way the frequented roads are frequented.
Gertrude Stein
#61. Ambrose Phillips ... who had the honor of bringing into fashion a species of composition which has been called, after his name, Namby Pamby.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#62. Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
#63. Nature is a mere pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art.
Georges Braque
#64. Usually I'm thinking about the palette. I'm thinking about the color for the most part, then I'll start thinking about composition and movement.
Steven Soderbergh
#65. What has stayed true all the way through my work is my composition, I hope, and my sense of color.
Annie Leibovitz
#66. I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.
Yves Klein
#67. In his imagination he performed the 'composition of place' reconstructing the scene from what he could remember of the classics, so laboriously and unprofitably rammed into his head at Harrow.
Dion Fortune
#68. Terror works like a musical composition, so many instruments, all in tune, playing perfectly together to create their desired effect. Sorrow and horror and fear.
Nancy Gibbs
#69. The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seemsas absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.
Mary Blakely
#70. In figure painting, the type of all painting, I have endeavoured to set forth that the principal if not sole source of life enchantments are Tactile Values, Movement and Space Composition.
Bernard Berenson
#71. I was 16 when I got a scholarship to study classical composition at a conservatory. By that time I had already listened to Scottish folksong with my mother, sung in church choirs, and had sung solo with Benjamin Britten conducting.
Jack Bruce
#72. I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#73. Your experiences today will influence the molecular composition of your body for the next two to three months," he tells his audience, "or, perhaps, for the rest of your life. Plan your day accordingly.
Anonymous
#74. When I read the rules of criticism, I immediately inquire after the works of the author who has written them, and by that means discover what it is he likes in a composition.
Joseph Addison
#75. When a man is made up wholly of the dove, without the least grain of the serpent in his composition, he becomes ridiculous in many circumstances of life, and very often discredits his best actions.
Joseph Addison
#76. 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
#77. I'm interested in producing truncated shapes in proportion to the frame and composition, shapes that are preferably luminous. I'm not interested in the full-figure. I want to abstract forms.
Ralph Gibson
#78. There can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with its laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless.
Herbert Spencer
#79. [T]he greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition.
Tom Holland
#80. After the Second World War, I returned to California to study composition with Darius Milhaud, who wrote wonderful works like 'Le Boeuf sur le Toit' and 'La Cretion du Monde.' I especially enjoy his work for two pianos, 'Scaramouche.'
Dave Brubeck
#81. The golden rule is work fast. As for framing, composition, focus-this is no time to start asking yourself questions: you just have to trust your intuition and the sharpness of your reflexes.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
#82. He taught me to stand on a street corner or in a room for an hour - or two or three - waiting for that great epiphany of a moment, the wondrous combination of subject, light, and composition. And something else: the inexplicable magic that made the image dive right into your heart.
Lynsey Addario
#83. Movies are pieces of film stuck together in a certain rhythm, an absolute beat, like a musical composition. The rhythm you create affects the audience.
John Carpenter
#84. I've always felt that there's a point where a piece seems to be alive, that is, living. And that's the point where I know the composition is finished.
David Tudor
#85. It was in Shizuoka, where my home was. I first attended this school when I was five years old. I also attended a regular elementary school, and I was taking piano lessons with a local teacher. I began to study composition at the Yamaha school. And I continued to study there until the age of 15.
Hiromi
#86. To plant is but a part of landscape composition; to co-ordinate is all.
Christopher Tunnard
#87. Analysis of the composition of samples of DNA from a great variety of sources and by many investigators revealed the remarkable fact that the purine content always equals the pyrimidine content.
Arthur Kornberg
#88. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
Florence King
#89. Never criticize the composition of a Royal Highness. You never know who may have written it.
Johannes Brahms
#90. A visual understanding of great composition and how to use a camera and expensive lenses can be learned, but drive and a real hunger for making photos and telling stories ... I don't think that part can be learned. You either have that inside, or you don't.
Aaron Huey
#91. I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.
Paul Auster
#92. The Smiths hasn't been equaled. That goes for the composition of the songs, the lyrics, and the performance.
Jeff Buckley
#95. The proposed Constitution is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal constitution; but a composition of both.
James Madison
#96. I want less and less control with music. Just playing music without any idea of composition or writing.
Yann Tiersen
#97. The composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelting to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity.
Samuel Johnson
#98. If I came out a photographer it's because I knew about painting, composition, and the handling of light.
Lola Alvarez Bravo
#99. I am hoping that, with the added wisdom of old age, I can still look ahead for an improvement in tone, line, colour and composition.
E. J. Hughes
#100. There is required for the composition of a great commander not only massive common sense and reasoning power, not only imagination, but also an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten.
Winston Churchill
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