Composition Quotes

417 quotes by 332 authors

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables. — Norton Juster
The same chemicals were used in the cooking as were used on the composition of her own being: only those which caused the most violent… — Anais Nin
Good composition is like a suspension bridge; each line adds strength and takes none away... Making lines run into each other is not composition. There… — Robert Henri
Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the… — Wilkie Collins
There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes… — Yevgeny Zamyatin
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the… — Mark Twain
I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the… — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only… — Milan Kundera
When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done… — Matsuo Basho
The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and… — Frank Zappa
You're so kind, Kazuhiko. That's what I like about you." I like you, too. I love you so much." If he weren't so inarticulate, Kazuhiko… — Koushun Takami
The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from… — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Perhaps the perusal of such works may, without injustice, be compared with the use of opiates, baneful, when habitually and constantly resorted to, but of… — Walter Scott
When things are in order, if the cause of the orderliness cannot be deduced from the motion of the elements or from the composition of… — Johannes Kepler
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together… — Milan Kundera
Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to… — Samuel Beckett
So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray… — Charles Dickens
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a… — Arthur Conan Doyle
We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much… — Pascal Mercier
It's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in… — Donald Miller

Who Wrote These Composition Quotes

332 authors contributed a total of 417 Composition Quotes, led by these top contributors: