Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Life without music is unthinkable.
Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.
Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
I have two answers to everything and one answer to nothing.
I hate you, Richard Wagner . . . but I hate you on my knees.
The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.
Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.
Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning.
I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.
To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.
It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.
I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.
Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Bernstein has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well known for over 400 years.
I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.
When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost.
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm
A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.
Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives.
Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?
Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.
Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.
The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy.
What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.
This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.
I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series.
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.