If you read reviews of concerts, the word 'creative' comes up all the time. However, performers playing music usually aren't creative. Critics might say they are, but they're just playing another persons work. They didn't create it. — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
So far as musical pedagogy is concerned - And by extension of musical creation - Nadia Boulanger is the most influential person who ever lived — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
Greatness is not the effect of which inspiration is the cause. We are all inspired, but we are all not great. — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
Intelligence is silence, truth is being invisible. But what a racket I make in declaring this. — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer. — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes. Frigidaires are perfect. Beauty limps. My frigidaire has had to be replaced. — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
The Great don't innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, they leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they've manured. A… — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist. — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
As a lifelong pacifist, Quaker, and a gay man, I despair that gays and lesbians are expending energy trying to get into the military… — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
“We endow our poor lovers with godly traits, and then destroy them for being mortal. ” — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
All men are forced into one of two categories: those with eleven fingers and those without. — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable. — Ned Rorem Copy Share Image
