Composing Music Quotes

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.

Composing music is what makes me happy.

Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.

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.

When composing music, I just start spilling things out and then wait until they take form, you know what I mean, until I see like a common thread or something.

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.

Music is indeed the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.

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

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

Although I don't know Paul McCartney, a mutual friend told me that Paul was reading my book, This Is Your Brain on Music, and stopped after chapter two. McCartney said he was concerned that if he learned more about how he does what he does (as far as composing music), he may not be able to do it anymore!

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

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.

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.

Music is the space between the notes.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.

This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, “Is there a meaning to music?” My answer to that would be, “Yes.” And “Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?” My answer to that would be, “No.”

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes", And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be "No."

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

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.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.