Ned Rorem Quotes

28 quotes in 303 categories

• As a lifelong pacifist, Quaker, and a gay man, I despair that gays and lesbians are expending energy trying to get into the military when…
• Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.
• Sooner or later you've heard all your best friends have to say. Then comes the tolerance of real love.
• Quarrels in France strengthen a love affair, in America they end it.
• Love is a mystery which, when solved, evaporates. The same holds for music.
• Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet.
• Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.
• The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty.
• The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience.
• Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.
• Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future.
• The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of
• All men are forced into one of two categories: those with eleven fingers and those without.
• Divine fires do not blaze each day, but an artist functions in their afterglow hoping for their recurrence.
• If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist.
• Don't be too dismissive of children. While it's true that few children are artists, all artists are children.
• Art means to dare - and to have been right.
• Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.
• In music the present is extended.
• Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

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