Ned Rorem Quotes
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Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.
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Divine fires do not blaze each day but an artist functions in their afterglow, hoping for their recurrence.
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Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes. Frigidaires are perfect. Beauty limps. My frigidaire has had to be replaced.
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Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.
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Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.
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Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet.
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The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty.
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An artist doesn't necessarily have deeper feelings than other people, but he can express these feelings. He is like everyone else-only more so! He speaks with a Formal Sigh.
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Anyone can be gay - it's no accomplishment - but only I can be me.
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Love is a mystery which, when solved, evaporates. The same holds for music.
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Don't be too dismissive of children. While it's true that few children are artists, all artists are children.
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Why, after all, must everyone like music? That they are missing something is just the lover's opinion.
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All men are forced into one of two categories: those with eleven fingers and those without.
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Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.
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If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.
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Nothing is a waste that makes a memory.
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If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest . . . she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists. Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death.
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There are no fascinating people, only their works are fascinating.
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It's not evil that's ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.
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composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.
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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 they should be using that same energy getting rid of the military completely.
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Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out, while Romantic grows from outside in.
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To start writing about your life is, from one standpoint, to stop living it. You must avoid adventures today so as to make time for registering those of yesterday.
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Minor artists borrow, great ones steal.
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The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience.
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Intelligence is silence, truth is being invisible. But what a racket I make in declaring this.
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Greatness is not the effect of which inspiration is the cause. We are all inspired, but we are all not great.
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To see itself through, music must have idea or magic. ... Music with neither dies young though rich.
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I don't go to concerts much. I've heard everything. When I do go to movies, I walk out half the time. As for literature, I've read everything.
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In music the present is extended.
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