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Updated February 6, 2012

 

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book. . . 10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. —Elmore Leonard: Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle

 

 

The stories otherstell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth? . . .Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories? — Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

 

 

In any kind of artistic activity, it is always the impulse, the expressive need, the inner compulsion which dictates in the first place, and not the technical equipment. Just as a hungry man will always get hold of food, if need be by force, so every original artist finds, as a rule unconsciously, the necessary technical means to still his spiritual hunger. — Carl Flesch, Memoirs

 

 

The Future Isn't Futuristic Anymore —designer Mark Newson

 

 

Brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity. —Susan Cain, The Rise of the New Groupthink

 

 

The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. — Adam Gopnik, The Caging of America

 

 

A characteristic of artistic education is for people to tell you that you’re a genius. . . So everybody gets this idea, if you go to art school, that you’re really a genius. Sadly, it isn’t true. Genius occurs very rarely. So the real embarrassing issue about failure is your own acknowledgement that you’re not a genius, that you’re not as good as you thought you were. . . There’s only one solution: You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you’re capable of doing, and what you’re not capable of doing. That is the only way to deal with the issue of success and failure because otherwise you simply would never subject yourself to the possibility that you’re not as good as you want to be, hope to be, or as others think you are. — Milton Glaser

 

 

"Interesting" things are often nonsense. — Louis Andriessen, The Art of Stealing Time

 

 

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion." There are a staggering amount of opinions out there, and a vast number of them are insipid, self-indulgent, frivolous: wrong. . . Encouraging people to think, and to stand up for what they believe, is terrific. So is discouraging them from standing up too soon, or too noisily. — Rick Gekoski

 

 

Never underestimate the role of the will in the artistic life. Some writers are all will. Talent you can dispense with, but not will. Will is paramount. Not joy, not delight, but grim application. — Alan Bennett, The Habit of Art

 

 

I’ve never been a big fan of the “imagine how revolutionary this piece was when it was written” school of inspiration. For my money, it should be revolutionary now. (And it is.) Whatever else the composer might have intended, he or she didn’t want you to think “boy that must have been cool back then.” — pianist Jeremy Denk, Jetlagged Manifesto

 

 

	The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task. — Malcolm Gladwell, The Tweaker: The real genius of Steve Jobs
The designation of someone as an artist, like the designation of someone as a genius, is elastic, and anyone can claim it for himself or herself and for each other. . . Artists, typically, aim to put something of enduring beauty into the world; consumer electronics companies aim to sell a lot of gadgets, manufacturing desire for this year’s model in the hope that people will discard last year’s. — Sue Halpern, Who Was Steve Jobs?

 

 

Yet it is not always the finished and perfected works that have the deepest influence. — Geoffrey O’Brien, The Grandest Duke

 

 

History is unpredictable, so the important thing is to stay adaptable. When you go to an unknown island, you don’t go with concrete expectations of what you might find there. — George Dyson, science historian
	If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going. — Professor Irwin Corey
When I draw, I’m somewhere else - a differen’t galaxy. I become my art. — George Dyson, artist

 

 

The most beautiful moments are not the formally perfect. On the contrary, they are when you feel the fragility, the abyss… when you feel that everything is at stake… those are the moments that touch me, that excite me the most, that seize me. I think that art best expresses itself in risk, not in comfort. — Hélène Grimaud

 

 

If we acknowledge written music as a “text” then we will welcome multiple readings of it. And not privilege the reading of it by its scriptor! If a composer tells you how to play, you’re not really allowing written music to function. A written piece achieves its identity as it is read, and heard variously by many people. — Bruce Brubaker, Don't Ask

 

 

What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
That which may not be spoken of may have already been sung, painted or danced for centuries. — Charles Seeger, Tractatus Esthetico-Semioticus

 

 

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution. — Emma Goldman

 

 

Not long ago it was generally accepted that humanity’s most creative achievements, from art and poetry to major scientific discoveries, were the precious fruits of solitude. But in a single heartbeat on humanity’s timeline, this sacred, fecund privacy has become the unpardonable social sin. . . the buzz inside and outside your head has murdered silence and reflection. But just as frightening is the harsh warning, explicit or implicit, that if you won’t be wired into the hive you won’t get your share of the honey. — Hal Crowther, One Hundred Fears of Solitude

 

 

When I compose, I notice I'm the only one in the room. — Steve Reich

 

So I wish you first a Sense of theatre; only Those who love illusion And know it will go far: Otherwise we spend our Lives in a confusion Of what we say and do with Who we really are. W. H. Auden

 

 

There is no perfection. One works and if one is lucky, one discovers something every day. At a certain time one must have the courage to stop, and that’s that. — Mitsuko Uchida

 

 

Standards always are out of date. That is what makes them standards. — Alan Bennett, Forty Years On

 

 

I'm never looking for a perfect performance, I'm looking for an impassioned performance. — Lorin Maazel

 

 

When I was a publisher, we were approached by an orchestra going on a tour. We quoted a fee for a living composer. They were going to go city to city. This was a student orchestra and so they got a low quote. Still, they complained. ‘What is your budget for this tour?’ I asked. Without exception, the budget for the composer is always a speck. In this case, it turned out they even had a budget for luggage tags. Can you imagine? This is true. And the amount for the luggage tags was more than for the actual music they were going to play.

Or think of it this way. Imagine putting on a concert with 100 musicians and you give them each $200, and the cost of the copyright is also $200. Imagine the composer as nothing more than the 101st musician. ... There is value in the music and the fact is the vast majority of orchestras understand that it’s a drop in the bucket and they treat it as just another fee. You pay the horn player and the light bill, and you pay the composer. — Corey Field

 

 

“What kind of instrument would a little girl your age play?” he asked.
“Umm…a piano?” I answered, my hand out the window, tracing the arc of the power lines.
“No, too big. How about a flute?”
I figured he was asking for his work. I wanted to be a help. My friend Lili had a flute.
“Maybe,” I replied, leaping a tree with my fingers.
— Alexandra Styron, Reading My Father: A Memoir

 

 

For me, the piano is the orchestra. I don’t like the sound of the piano as a piano. I like to imitate the orchestra — the oboe, the clarinet, the violin and, of course, the singing voice. . . My tragedy in life is that I never wanted to be a pianist. Piano was for fun. I wanted to be a composer. — Vladimir Horowitz, NYT interview (1988)

 

 

Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. — John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

 

 

... composers sometimes pick up different instruments when trying to solve musical problems. It’s not that a violin offers up secrets the piano withholds, but that the mind starts thinking differently when we play different instruments. . . There seems to be a rhythm to writing that catches notes that ordinarily stay out of earshot. At some point between formulating a thought and writing it down falls a nanosecond when the thought becomes a sentence that would, in all likelihood, have a different shape if we were to speak it. This rhythm, not so much heard as felt, occurs only when one is composing; it can’t be simulated in speech, since speaking takes place in real time and depends in part on the person or persons we’re speaking to. Wonderful writers might therefore turn out to be only so-so conversationalists, and people capable of telling great stories waddle like ducks out of water when they attempt to write. — Arthur Krystal, When Writers Speak

 

 

The composer is seldom a great theorist; the theorist is never a great composer. Each is equally fatal to and essential in the other. — Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

 

 

To me, the suggestion that a composer’s creativity is somehow adversely affected by a gravy train of copyright revenue is really misguided . . . You want to hear about uncertainty? I am in the business of creating something from nothing — for a living. Think about that. Do you realize how difficult and wildly speculative that actually is? With everything I write, I begin by staring at a blank music sheet of paper and realizing that I have to somehow live up to the expectations not only of the commissioner who puts up money for it, but of the musicians who will play the music, the audience (and critics) that will hear it, as well as the standard the previous works from my catalog have apparently set for these people to decide to pay me to write them music. — Bill Holab

 

 

The general rule is: if you want to know about music, don't ask a musician. Most talk of nothing but wages and employment, most composers of commissions, reviews and other composers. — Wesley Stace, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

 

 

Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance that has grown stale, which men of old have spoken. — Khakheperresenb (ca. 2000 BC), Quoted in The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970) by Walter Jackson Bate.
Originality . . . includes not only saying something for the first time, but re-saying (in a worthy new way) the already said: rearranging an old tune in a different key, to a different rhythm, perhaps on a different instrument. Has that been said before? No matter: on with the story! — John Barth, Do I Repeat Myself?

 

 

It is difficult, if not impossible, for those who do not perform to be good judges of the performance of others. — Aristotle, On Music

It is interesting to see what happens when words lose their contexts. Some fade into history . . . But the words ‘ought’ and ‘art’ are still in constant use. Why? Obviously, because there are people who wish to continue using them. One can think of many people who would reject the divine law conception of ethics, yet could never renounce the pleasure of telling other people what they ‘ought’ to do. Similarly, there are those who reject the formerly-accepted notion of ‘art’, yet find it convenient (not to say lucrative) to continue using the word, applying it to their own activities in order to benefit from its still-prestigious associations and its ‘mesmeric force’. And thus it is that a pile of rubbish produced by some harmless lunatic can be converted into a valuable commodity by the mere bestowal of the description ‘art’. — Mark Roberts, Let’s Abolish ‘Art’!

 

 

"We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances." — Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1627)

 

 

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind—or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean—except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down. — Julian Barnes, Homage to Hemingway

 

 

I had always envisioned the lives of composers to be rather cusy. Then I met them. — Rob Deemer

 

 

No, I don't like jazz at all, too intellectual for me. A lot of people like jazz but I think it's boring, I like more sentimental, emotional music, it gets me high. — Cy Twombly

 

 

We went into a café. There was the usual young man, pale and dissipated, playing the piano, while another man, old and tired, scraped away on a fiddle, and a third made discordant noises on a saxophone. . . They might have been robots, so mechanical was their performance, and I asked myself if it was possible that at one time, when they were setting out, they had thought they might be musicians whom people would come from far to hear and to applaud. Even to play the violin badly you must take lessons and practice: did that fiddler go to all that trouble just to play foxtrots till the small hours of the morning in that stinking squalor? — W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

 

 

There is nothing really beautiful but that which is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some want, and man's needs are ignoble and discusting, like his poor infirm nature. The most useful part of a house is the toilet — Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, introduction to Mademoiselle du Maupin (1834, 1835)

 

 

"I was once given a death sentence to prepare, full of arabesques and wax seals, that was then shown to the convict on his way to the gallows. He said: Thank the calligrapher for having turned my crimes into something so beautiful; I would kill ten more men just to have him create something similar again. Never, in my life, have I received higher praise." — from Pablo De Santtis, Voltaire's Calligrapher

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. — Samuel Beckett

Teachers tend to form opinions about music, and these are always getting in the way of creation. The teacher, like the parent, must always have an answer for everything. If he doesn't he loses prestige. He must make up a story about music and stick to it. Nothing is more sterilizing. — Virgil Thomson, The State of Music

Students, in my experience, soon work out whether what you are teaching matters to you. If it does, then they are prepared to consider letting it matter to them too. But if they conclude, rightly or wrongly, that it doesn't matter, then, curtains, you may as well go home. — J. M. Coetzee, Summertime

Our best artists make stuff they know is bad; the difference is that they destroy it themselves. — Germaine Greer, Now please pay attention everybody. I'm about to tell you what art is

Hi-de-hi-de-hi-di-hi! Ho-de-ho-de-ho-de-ho! He-de-he-de-he-de-he! Ho-de-ho-de-ho! — Cab Calloway

I like the idea that there's something beyond the painting. Beyond what you can see. — George Condo

 

 

I'm on record with the opinion that the world would be a better place if every young performer sacrificed an hour of practice every day for an hour of reading aesthetics, philosophy, art history, current events, plays, novels, and so on. This must be doubly true for children under pressure to overachieve. — Colin Holter, What Defines a Musician Most?

 

 

I also resist notions that everything we do must be “good for us” in order to be valued. . . would it be possible to resolve to learn a musical instrument or listen to more music just because it seems interesting, not because we are trying to reform or improve ourselves? Are music and the arts truly served if arts education becomes the vegetable on our plate? Our version of spinach, for the brain? — Sarah Lutman, Eat your spinach, and other arguments for learning to play music

 

 

It’s tough to be a Grand Old Man of — well, anything, really. . . Stick around long enough and, to most people, you’re no longer an artist; you’re a brand. . . So it would be tempting to say that what we have here . . . will nonetheless be extravagantly praised because its author is still deeply respected and, hey, isn’t it wonderful that he’s still making a go of it at his age? — David Orr

 

 

Art is anything you can get away with.— Marshall McLuhan

 

 

Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” isn’t really about a cockroach. . . And we even understand that June isn’t literally busting out all over. — Robert Sapolsky, This Is Your Brain on Metaphors

 

 

I always tell artists that they should be getting rejected all the time, that way they know that they are applying for enough opportunities. — Karen Atkinson

Gradually the humanities are being invaded and disciplined by explanations . . . which purport to sweep away the mess of hermeneutics and replace it with clean, meaningful science. And the explanations really are as absurd . . .absurd precisely because they are looking to explain something that they have not defined. . . Consider mathematics. . . suppose that we came, in time, to think that mathematics is after all maladaptive: say because the spirit of inquiry that results from it, and which leads inexorably to an obsession with Mobius bands and transfinite cardinals, disables us from the immediacies of practical life. Would that do anything to undermine the validity of our proofs, or to cast new light on what they signify? Of course not. Mathematics is a realm which has its own internal procedures, and which is understood not by explaining its origin, but by applying its proofs. . . Well, the same goes, it seems to me, for the humanities. The attempt to explain art, music, literature, and the sense of beauty as adaptations is both trivial as science and empty as a form of understanding. It tells us nothing of importance about its subject matter, and does huge intellectual damage in persuading ignorant people that after all there is nothing about the humanities to understand, since they have all been explained — and explained away. — Roger Scruton, Only Adapt:Can science explain art, music and literature?

Many works of the past (and of the present) complete what they announce they are going to do, to our increasing boredom. Certain others plague me because I cannot follow their intentions. . . I am spending my life trying to find out what Rembrant was up to. — Philip Guston, Faith, Hope, and Impossibility

I had the energy of the era and the intensity of my neuroses — Elia Kazan, A Life

 

 

As the profile of music as a tool for social transformation grows ever higher, more organisations appear to be latching on to the idea that music can bring peace. The sorry truth is that, much as we'd like it to, it can't. . . These ensembles comfort the sensibilities of well-heeled audiences. They focus our attention on utopian ideals while distracting us from reality on the ground. We've fallen into the trap of using music as a shield to protect us from the pain of what's really out there. — Jessica Duchen, Maestro, please stop preaching at us

 

 

Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. — Jonah Lehrer, The Truth Wears Off

 

 

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure. — Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

Like any artistic tradition, no matter how antitraditional it may be, the avant-garde also has its conventions. — Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde [1962]

 

 

He knew it was absurd to think so, but a day which did not provide at least some progress to his book seemed a day completely lost. In vain he argued with himself that a man could hardly make his writing a reason for living unless he believed in the validity of that writing. The difficulty was that he could find no other reason; the work had to be it. At the same time he was unable to attach any importance to the work itself. He knew, no matter what anyone said to the contrary, that it was valueless save as a personal therapy. "Life has to be got through some way or other," he would tell himself. To others he said: "Writing is harmless, and it keeps me in dinners and out of trouble." — Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

 

 

Once the new was shocking, not because it set out to shock, but because it set out to be new. Now, all too often, the shock is the new. And shock, in our jaded culture, wears off easily. — Salman Rushdie

"I see. And under what grounds do you have to come here and stop my show?"

"You just can't use the saxophone in the orchestra anymore."

"Come again?"

"The saxophone is a instrument of the imperialists. The saxophone was invented by a man named Sax in Belgium! Do you know what the Belgian imperialists are doing in the Congo? They're a bunch of murderers."

"You don't say."

"No, I do say! And I am saying that if you want the orchestra to play, then you have to go without the saxophone. Otherwise, I will stop the show." — Guillermo Cabrera Infante, The Lost City

 

 

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. — Bertrand Russell, Study of Mathematics

"I don't get modern art."

"I doubt modern art gets you, either." — James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia

 

 

Scientific advances are often triggered by taking oddities seriously. — Graham Priest, Paradoxical Truth

 

 

There are plenty of mediocre talents who somehow manage to rise to the top by their sheer dedication and the luck of what connections they have. There are many great talents who don’t succeed because they don’t have the stick-to-it-iveness to fight the fight. And then there are even people who have the talent and work their asses off and still don’t ever get the big break. — Natalie Wilson, Birth of a Play(wright)

 

 

But success and merit are different things. Merit is an inherent quality of the work in question. It’s fixed in time. Once the piece is set down it has merits to be discovered, explored, and evaluated. Merit is a function of the piece, the viewer, and nothing else (assuming you can factor away things like production values, performances, interpretations, i.e. the work is formless). Success, as usually defined, is not a quality of the work at all, but an evaluation of how the work interacts with the world. One would like to believe that success is a function of merit, but there are obviously many other variables in that particular equation. And if success is rare, instant success is almost nonexistent. Instant and enduring success? Good luck with that. — Brian M. Rosen, Merit vs Success

 

 

MUSIC MASTER: Philosophy is something; but music, sir, music . . .

DANCING MASTER: Music and dancing, music and dancing, that's all that's necessary.

MUSIC MASTER: There's nothing so useful in a State as music.

DANCING MASTER: There's nothing so necessary to men as dancing.

MUSIC MASTER: Without music, a State cannot subsist.

DANCING MASTER: Without the dance, a man can do nothing.

MUSIC MASTER: All the disorders, all the wars one sees in the world happen only from not learning music.

DANCING MASTER: All the misfortunes of mankind, all the dreadful disasters that fill the history books, the blunders of politicians and the faults of omission of great commanders, all this comes from not knowing how to dance. — Moliere, The Middle Class Gentleman (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme)

 

 

As musicians, our pragmatic desire for quick improvement can be balanced by focussing on the highest level of aspiration -- goals that may take a very long time, or even be impossible to reach. Some quick fixes foreclose the possibility of meeting especially difficult or nuanced challenges.— Stock market "day traders" liquidate whatever positions they've taken, each day before the closing bell. They are fully "in cash" every night. There are many unforeseeable risks that effect the value of an investment during the market's off-hours. Perhaps it's too dangerous to be holding anything when the market's not available to cash out? For these guys, every plan must be finished right away -- every question answered. For day traders, holding an open position is just too risky.— For artists it may be the opposite. For most artists, great risk comes from finishing tasks too quickly (with shortcuts?), or from insisting on finding solutions to every challenge by the end of the day's work. — Bruce Brubaker, Day trading

 

 

She can remember the moment that made her realize photography was a medium she could dedicate her career to as an art historian. . . She went to Manhattan to see "New Documents" at MOMA and was stopped by a Diane Arbus photo. It wasn't the picture itself that struck her. It was the man who was standing in front of the picture spitting at it. "It made me think, 'Why would somebody take so seriously a picture that they had to do that?" — SFMOMA curator brings focus and vision [San Francisco Chronicle, 11/14/2010]

 

 

What artist[s] choose is the arena of their engagement. Innovators are those who make their visual thinking tangible and extend it, each piece a part of an internal symposium brought to light. In a consumer culture, where the new is not a shock but an economic imperative, the most innovative act might be steadfast loyalty to the depths and nuances of a single point of view. — Regina Hackett

 

Is it hot in the rolling-mill? Are the hours long? Is $1.15 a day not enough? Then escape is very easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another 'Rosenkavalier. — H.L. Mencken

 

 

We're clearly a bad judge of our own creations. We should just put it out and let the world decide. — Derek Sivers, Obvious to you. Amazing to others

 

 

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. — George Bernard Shaw

 

 

György Ligeti once said that when composing, he derived stimulation from the odour of a freshly-sharpened Faber Castell pencil. — Wolfgang Rihm

 

 

The reason I love the blank canvas is because it makes everyone day-dream. The process of imagining what should be there is much more fun than if something was already there. There have been a hundred paintings imagined onto that canvas. It's got unlimited potential. It'd be a shame to wreck that with a bunch of paint.

The blank page starts with unlimited potential. But each word you add reduces its possibilities. — Derek Sivers, Why wreck a blank canvas?

 

 

I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution — if you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that’s up to you — you’re the client — but you pay me.’ — Steve Jobs on Paul Rand

 

 

In the kingdom of ends everything has a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. — Immanuel Kant

 

 

One of the funny things about actors is that people look at their careers in retrospect, as if they have a plan. . . Mostly, you just get a call. You're just sitting there going, 'Oh, my God. I'm never going to work again. Oh, God. I'm too old. Maybe I should go and work for Howard Dean.' And then it changes. — actress Jill Clayburgh

 

 

If we choose to pry culture away from capitalism while the rest of life is still capitalistic, culture will become a slum. — Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

In our day of the omnipresent virtuoso, virtuosity is in itself not the wonder. The wonder is that any virtuoso performer is more interested in music's vast literature than in displaying his performing gifts. — William Schuman, The Complete Musician: Vincent Persichetti and Twentieth-Century Harmony

 

 

What cries out for explanation is the strange, persistent fact that millions of us spend years attempting something for which we are certain to see little, if any, reward. . . German children have a toy they call the Stehaufmännchen. Our kids are half German, so we’ve had quite a few of these small "stand-up." He’s a fat fellow, made of plastic or wood, and weighted at the base. Every time you knock him over, he rolls drunkenly and then pops back up. The Stehaufmännchen has become my talisman: a symbol of the fortitude it takes to face a decade of rejection and to keep at it, day after day. . . Every morning requires facing failure, picking up something half-made, working at it, pushing it forward, trying to advance and to not feel too discouraged. — Alix Christie, We Ten Million

Kids never say when telling a favorite joke, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.” If they laughed at it once, it is 14 times as funny on the 14th telling. — Lisa Von Drasek, Reading Dogs and Untrained Boys

 

 

 

 

The philosophers whose work is most admired by other philosophers are very different from the philosophers who occasionally float to public consciousness. — Steve Pyke, Philosophers Through the Lens

 

 

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. — George Orwell, Why I Write

You tell me you are going to Fez. Now, if you say you are going to Fez, That means you are not going. But I happen to know that you are going to Fez. Why have you lied to me, you who are my friend? — Moroccan Saying

 

 

Doesn’t everyone know that in our beginning is our end? But So what doesn’t account for his plunge off the deep end. Almost any calling that might be considered — poet or autoworker or jazz pianist — seems from the perspective of common sense to be quixotic and probably doomed. Maybe it is enough to say So what? — Geoffrey Wolff, The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum

 

 

I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. They don't move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that's about all. — Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

For me a painting is finished when I finally understand why I wanted to do it in the first place. . . the most interesting thing is to go to the end of an idea, to play something out almost to the point of madness. — Thomas Nozkowski

"They think they know once and for all what the world is like, so that they don't ever have to look at it again," he had thought. And it was true: many of his friends had decided what the world looked like, what life was like, and they would never examine either of them again to find out whether they were right or wrong. . . . In the school they teach you what the world means, and once you have learned, you will always know," Amar's father had told him. "But suppose the world changes?" Amar had thought. "Then what would you know?" — Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

Music can explore, meaningfully, new and uncharted territories when it acts like a movie camera—focusing, analyzing the sound subject—and when the composer, like a movie director, decides the angles, the speed, the close-ups, the zooms, the blow-ups, the editing, and the silences. — Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future

 

 

Anyone who has slowly shaped an original sentence knows what it feels like to edge toward a word or phrase and then toward a more apt one—one that suddenly touches off a new thought. — John Felstinger, Translating Neruda

 

 

The acoustician's observations are useful to the composer only if blended with artistic intuition. — Vincent Persichetti, Twentieth-Century Harmony

 

 

The more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates. — T.S. Eliot

 

 

Georgia Tech neuroscientist Paul Corballis has theorized that brain injuries can in some cases help free the mind to be more open and creative, particularly in cases where the injury harms linguistic ability. . . "Language is the bully of the brain," he says. "It takes up its own space and if something else gets crowded out, too bad. — Paul Jablow, Study of brain injury hints at roots of creativity

 

 

Looking up at the numberless stars, he thinks, “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me! . . . And all this they’ve caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!”

Because this immense sense of self hums its own intoxicating music, these characters cannot play in the milder orchestras of give-and-take, and are often poor at crediting the discrete existence of others. — James Wood, Movable Types: How “War and Peace” works.

 

 

Sometimes it makes sense, or appears to at first glance, when talented artists choose to take up a second line of creative endeavor. Only on closer inspection does the extent and originality of their achievement become clear. . . I find it at once inspiring and frustrating to watch a genius pull a second rabbit out of his hat. — Terry Teachout, Unforgettable in More Than One Way

 

 

The progress of an artist is a continual self--sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. — T.S. Eliot

 

 

Artists use titles to encrypt or deceive as much as to assist the audience in reading their work. It depends on the artist. — Ryan Gander, artist

If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career. But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line. — maverick mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot

 

 

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. . . Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know. — T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent

 

 

Although it is natural to assume that a persistent and enthusiastic advocate of a belief is brimming with confidence,” they write in the journal Psychological Science, “the advocacy might in fact signal that the individual is boiling over with doubt. — David Gal and Derek D. Rucker, When in Doubt, Shout! Paradoxical Influences of Doubt on Proselytizing

 

 

Literary translators tend to divide into what one could call originalists and activists. The former honor the original text’s quiddities, and strive to reproduce them as accurately as possible in the translated language; the latter are less concerned with literal accuracy than with the transposed musical appeal of the new work. Any decent translator must be a bit of both. . . Translation is not a transfer of meaning from one language to another, Pevear writes, but a dialogue between two languages. — James Wood, Movable Types: How “War and Peace” works.

 

 

. . .it’s easier to assimilate rhythm’s sameness to your fantasies than to step out of yourself and follow melody’s different changes. . . the hallmark of great popular art used to be the way a performer put an original twist on a standard genre or formula. . . It used to be that performers strove to create excellence and originality within a popular style, in order to become popular. They competed against each other’s work. In today’s culture, you strive only to be popular—in order to become popular. You compete against other, measurable degrees of popularity. You strive to come as close to reproducing a successful “original” style as possible. You must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else. . . To put it another way, popular culture used to draw people to what they like. Popularity culture draws people to what everyone else likes. . . The manipulation of participation in order to create popularity—with the result being a radical lowering of standards—is now rife throughout the culture. . . The most baleful potential of the new participatory and popularity culture is, on the one hand, to create people who are cut off from their fellow citizens, floating in a disconnected space where their imperial conception of self bears no relation to who they really are. They do not respond to anything that either does not reflect their own experience, or that does not allow them to “produce” it, as well as to consume it. Behind this “access” and “transparency” thrives a low tolerance for facts that obstruct the ego, and a fanatical thirst to nourish one’s amour-propre on public figures’ slightest infractions. As in the enjoyment of reality television, public humiliation is becoming a national pastime for this new, disconnected, imperial self. — Lee Siegel, Participatory Culture and the Assault on Democracy

 

 

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else. Their concepts take time to develop and incubate and sit around in the back of their minds sometimes for decades. — Steve Johnson

 

 

If I do original work all well and good. But if I can say it (the matter of form I mean) by translating the work of others that also is valuable. What difference does it make? — William Carlos Williams

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. – Albert Einstein

 

 

To put it rather bluntly, normal people do not compose – or they compose like Carl Czerny or Murzio Clementi. You need a certain amount of openness and non-conformism to be creative. People who are considered mad have not been taught by life to wall up their openness and they have more direct contact to their unconscious. — Heinz Holliger on Robert Schumann

 

 

[there is] a kind of saintly vocation in the sheer act of copying. . . the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. . . Copying is to be the text being copied. — Walter Benjamin

 

 

A musical work is never alone—it always has a big family to cope with, and it must be capable of living many lives; it can be left to its own past, and it must be capable of living in the present in a variety of ways, at times forgetful of its origins. — Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future

 

 

You cannot work on one thing with your hands and another thing with your head, especially when it comes to marble. — Michelangelo

 

 

. . . when everything is said and done, the most meaningful analysis of a symphony is another symphony. — Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future

 

 

 

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Baghdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz music. Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. — Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

 

 

The form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood. These give it a wealth of different resonances and echoes impairing its original essence. — Umberto Eco, The Open Work

 

 

The genius gazes (ideally with smoldering eyes) into transcendent realms of truth and beauty invisible to lesser beings, and is inevitably destroyed by proximity to absolute truth and/or the jealousy of the dim establishment. Whether this accurately describes the genius's biography is beside the point; it was the story the romantics wanted to tell each other, and to hear. . . The romantic view of the self—"nobody understands me, I'm made of higher stuff than the mundanes I have to live among"—belongs, these days, to teenagers. — Jordan Ellenberg

 

 

 

I’ve never been a big fan of the ‘Imagine how revolutionary this piece was when it was written’ school of inspiration. For my money, it should be revolutionary now. (And it is.) Whatever else the composer might have intended, he or she didn’t want you to think, ‘Boy, that must have been cool back then.’ The most basic compositional intent, the absolute ur-intent, is that you play it now, you make it happen now. — Jeremy Denk

 

 

There are lots of things we believe but don’t know. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you’re mistaken, you believe what you believe. — David Sosa, The Spoils of Happiness

 

 

Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing. — James Surowiecki, Later: What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?

 

 

Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. Ideally, a sentence read aloud, in a foreign language, should still sound like something, even if the listener has no idea what it is he or she is being told. — Michael Cunningham

 

 

Musical instruments are tools useful to man, but they are tools that lack objectivity: they produce sounds that are anything but neutral, which acquire meaning by testing meaning itself with reality of facts. . . Musical instruments act and think with us and, at times, in our "absentminded" moments, they even think for us. — Luciano Berio, Rembering the future

 

 

Technical terms, especially Greek ones, sound very authoritative: take some dianoia, add in a little sophrosyne, sprinkle over it a smidgeon of anagnorisis, work the whole lot into a lovely peripeteia, and wait for the inevitable katharsis. — Steve Waters

 

 

Happy the person who can simply beat time along with the music. But unfortunately, people also attach to it fondly cherished feelings of which the musical work knows nothing. They attach little images which they have painted in their own minds or hackneyed, allegedly explicatory words, a second kind of tone painting, so they speak. Music is surrounded by groping colloquies that never cease, even though they are no means of comprehension. . . Many mathematical brains, we are told, are supposed to have shown a surprising propensity and often a real gift for music. Conversely, though, men who were musicians by vocation did not pursue mathematics as a sideline; so the path is at lease not two-way. And a certain embarrassment usually arises if we enquire what type and manner of mathematical thinking does reappear in music, and above all, where. — Ernst Bloch, On the mathematical and dialectical character in music (Essay, 1925)

Playing jazz wasn't frowned upon, but it wasn't part of the regular thing, If you wanted to be a musician, you learned fugal techniques and counterpoint, the same stuff they've been learning for 300 years. Then, you picked the style that you wanted to play, whether it was symphonic music, or string quartets, or dance band, or theater music. We all share the same elements — the same scales, harmonic structure — it's just what you do with it. — Phil Woods, interview International Musician 9/10

 

 

I had never before collaborated with someone from a different field, We used the same terms, but they meant something completely different to a composer and a choreographer. — Kaija Saariaho, NYT 9/19/10

 

 

When Albers showed me that one color was as good as another and that you were just expressing a personal preference if you thought a certain color would be better, I found that I couldn't decide to use one color instead of another, because I really wasn't interested in taste. I was so involved with the materials separately that I didn't want painting to be simply an act of employing one color to do something to another color, like using red to intensify green, because that would imply some subordination od red . . . I didn't want color to serve me, in other words. That's why I ended up doing the all-white and all-black paintings — one of the reasons, anyway. — Robert Rauschenberg

 

 

 

. . . listening has remained just about the most important thing I can think of doing. In fact, I spend way more time listening to music than composing or performing it. And while I frequently feel enormously frustrated that I have so little time these days for fleshing out my own compositional ideas, I would not want to skew the equation in the other direction. I would probably never perform or create anything of my own at all if not spurred on by engaged listening to what other people have done. Not that I'm looking for models to emulate, but rather the actual process of listening is powerful creative fuel. — Frank J. Oteri

 

 

The government may use the radio (or television) on public vehicles for many purposes. Today it may use it for a cultural end. Tomorrow it may use it for political purposes. So far as the right of privacy is concerned the purpose makes no difference. The music selected by one bureaucrat may be as offensive to some as it is soothing to others. The news commentator chosen to report on the events of the day may give overtones to the news that please the bureau head but which rile the streetcar captive audience. The political philosophy which one radio speaker exudes may be thought by the official who makes up the streetcar programs to be best for the welfare of the people. But the man who listens to it on his way to work in the morning and on his way home at night may think it marks the destruction of the Republic. — Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, dissenting opinion in Public Utilities Comm'n v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451 (1952)

 

 

Restrictions will set you free. — W. A. Mathieu, The Listening Book

 

 

ars imitatur naturam in sua operatione [art imitates nature in its manner of operation]— St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica

 

 

I sent around my first novel and I found that anyone I sent it to became unreachable because no one knew what the hell to say to me, including my mother for a brief period. I had the horrible awakening that any writer knows of discovering that I had done something that everyone hated. — Jennifer Egan, (interview)

 

 

The shift in understanding creativity is well underway. The stereotypes of miraculous breakthrough moments—and the incessant drive to locate them in the head of epic individuals—are slowly yielding to a portrait of complex, meandering, inherently social paths toward innovation. — Joshua Wolf Shenk, Two Is the Magic Number: A new science of creativity

 

 

You're influenced by everything. Sight and sound are not that far apart. They deal with sensibility. Sensibility is, finally, your ability to sense. These are all mysterious things, though, you know. . . Excellence, is what we're talkin' about. I loved painting. And painting's a lot like jazz, too. The great ones: same thing. — Artie Shaw

 

 

Literature, I believe, is not the handmaiden of psychological or sociological surmise; it is its own reason for being and ought not to be tampered with by those with self-serving agendas. — Jane Juska

 

 

"I don't know why it is that ideas never occur to me except when I lack the time to put them down or when it is literally impossible to do so, as for instance when I am seated in a dentist's chair or surrounded by talking people at a dinner party, or even when sound asleep, when often the best things come to light and are recognized as such by a critical part of my mind which is there watching, quite capable of judging but utterly unable to command an awakening and a recording. Sick-bed and fever often bring up astonishing things, but again, to what avail?"— Paul Bowles, If I should Open My Mouth

 

 

When one artist talks about another, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself. — Milan Kundera, Encounter

 

 

While the values of morality are the emblems of our commonalities, the values of aesthetics are the badges of our particularities. — Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art

 

 

Once a New Brunswick minister of education, meeting me, said happily: "Oh, you're the writer. Well you should know, I never read myself." The fact is, he was lucky. I am a New Brunswick writer, and didn't expect him to. If he had said the same thing to Margaret Atwood or Mordecai Richler, they would have had a field day lampooning him in various interviews and papers. That is, the poor fellow unknowingly relied upon a civility and kindness he himself did not register to me. I am not bothered by this. If I was, I probably never would have written anything. — David Adams Richards, Artists tell our truths

 

 

The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it. — Paul Klee, diary entry #733 (December 1905)

 

Modern physics has shown that when we move far from the comfort of our everyday lives to explore the extremes of time and space, many of our basic assumptions start to crumble. . . What is there that we can rely on? Which of our deeply held principles is pulling the wool over our mind's eye and blinding us to the deeper truths? We physicists spend our days challenging what is known and striving to discover where our knowledge is inadequate or just plain wrong. And history is littered with the debris of discarded misconceptions. — Tamara M. Davis, Is the Universe Leaking Energy?

 

 

. . . the biggest problem with trying to establish rules about things as personal as drinking or writing is that however good the advice, the person on the receiving end is never going to be able to take somebody else’s word for it. You have to find out about these things for yourself, usually the hard way. You write and drink as you see fit, partly out of choice, often out of need, and if you wake up next morning, look back on what you’ve done and feel mortified and shaken — well, maybe you’ve learned something. But this lesson is never transferable. Somebody tells you not to mix Zima with Drambuie, somebody says that rewriting Icelandic myths in the style of Candace Bushnell [Sex and the City, Lipstick Jungle, 4 Blondes] is a really bad idea, but you may feel compelled to go ahead and do it anyway. — Geoff Nicholson, Drink What You Know

 

 

 

 

I realize a blog is a good way to keep your website alive and to involve your potential audience. But explaining how you make a dance, the problems you encounter and how you solve them, is not going to help either you as the choreographer or your potential audience. To dig into your imagination enough to make a dance, you need to be embroiled in a place where there is no explanation. As Igor Stravinsky once said, you have to dig underground, in the dark, like a mole, groping for what comes next. You have to be willing to sink into that layer of not knowing in order to come up with something you’ve never seen or done before. During that beginning period, putting it into words denies the groping phase. You should be utterly at a loss for words, just feeling your way. After a while, you can start to justify your decisions to yourself, to your dancers, or to your audience if your presenter so wishes. But first, you have to be willing to be lost in that pre-verbal place. — Wendy Perron, Blogging About the Process of Choreography—Ugh!

 

 

So, you know, you pay a big price for being—off the beat, off the beam. You go off the path that everybody walks on—you need a machete to hack your way through that jungle. . . It's a difficult place to be. — Artie Shaw

 

 

"Eli Black believes in the myth of the artist. This is a myth that holds everything must be sacrificed for art. It may not be a foolish myth if, say, one is Michelangelo or Beethoven. But if one is less than that, then the myth of the artist is very destructive, sadly so for the people who become involved with him." — Joseph Epstein, My Brother Eli

 

 

Good filmmakers expend their energy smoothing out contradictions in character and building logical transitions between scenes; great ones know that inconsistency can sometimes be a virtue. . . a film is not a closed, perfect, self-contained object, but something necessarily open, messy and incomplete, successful to the extent that its unfinished, imperfect quality engages and challenges a viewer. — Dave Kehr

 

 

The tiny inkmarks of which a symphony consists may have been made long ago, but when they are fulfilled in sound they become imminent and mighty. — Paul Bowles, A Distant Episode

 

 

For creativity you need your mind to wander, but you also need to be able to notice that you’re mind wandering and catch the idea when you have it. If Archimedes had come up with a solution in the bathtub but didn’t notice he’d had the idea, what good would it have done him? — Jonathan Schooler

 

 

 

 

Now the world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger. — W. Somerset Maugham, Great Novelists and Their Novels

 

 

Art is math. Some artists add, some subtract. The rest multiply. — Regina Hackett

 

 

The finest musician can have a bad day: it’s a paradox of the process, in which less than an hour of playing is supposed to determine whether a musician is suitable for the continual day in, day out life of an orchestra member. And in another contradiction, the aspirants play alone for a job that depends on group effort. — Daniel J. Wakin, Need a Job? Help Wanted at the N.Y. Philharmonic

 

 

The narrative of the universe does not unfold in space. It unfolds in time. . . time is that which makes contradictions possible. — Craig Callendar, Is Time an Illusion?

 

 

"Wrong," Jamie said. . . "Look, how do you think people get to be able to do a thing? First they pretend they can do it, and then they do it, and then they can do it." — Deborah Eisenberg, Rosie Gets a Soul

 

Examining a music manuscript, inevitably I sense the man behind the notes. The fascination of a composer's notation is the fascination of human personality. — Aaron Copland

 

 

Insight is to be achieved not by digging below the surface, but rather by organizing what is before us in an illuminatingly perspicuous manner. — Alexander George, The Difficulty of Philosophy

 

 

The first time Ms. Kistler met Balanchine was in the main rehearsal hall on the fifth floor of the New York State Theatre in early 1979. The entire room came to a sudden halt when an enormous crash echoed from the back of the studio. Nureyev, Patricia McBride and Balanchine all turned to the source of the disruption. An embarrassed 14-year-old Darci was down, and it wasn't pretty. She was on her rear, legs flailing about, a colt out of control. Balanchine smiled at her. Now he knew her. He loved it when dancers fell. It meant they weren't playing it safe, they weren't "waiting." Ms. Kistler never did play it safe and down she went more than once while reaching for the great Balanchinian "More!" — Darci Kistler Exits the Stage

 

 

There's a music of the spheres all the time, but these sounds would make the worst pollution you can imagine . . . — Karlheinz Stockhausen

 

 

. . . avoid the c-word. Cool is a word that often crops up when it comes to talking about art, and it's always bugged me. Being creative is all about being unselfconscious; being prepared to make a bit of a fool of myself. In my experience, embarrassment is not fatal. Few groups are straighter or more conservative than teenagers, who take cool seriously. And what makes cool very immature in my book is that it's a binary judgment: hip v square; in v out. . . I'd like to make a plea for difficulty over cool. In the end, I think being difficult is the coolest thing you can be. . . When I listen to a piece of classical music, what makes me well up is not just the melody, or the musicians' interpretation, it is the thought of the thousands and thousands of hours of practice. I'm in awe of the rigour, the dedication. . . In art nowadays, there's a terrible sense that anything goes – it makes me a bit sad. Musicians must continue to make difficult work, music that I can aspire to understand – and do it for the love of it. Here in the arts, we have to set a good example. — Grayson Perry, Speaking at the 21st Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards

 

 

Whatever music can be made with notation cannot be made without it, and vice versa. — Richard Winslow

 

 

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. — Igor Stravinsky

At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. — Thelonious Monk

 

Art history seeks explanations, but frequently any review of historical facts comes upon critical junctures that are inherently puzzling, bizarre,and irrational, things that defy any simple form of answer. — Henry Adams, Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock

 

 

It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself. — Don DeLillo, Point Omega

 

 

When I was nine, I asked my Dad, ‘Can I have your movie camera? That old, wind-up 8-millimeter movie camera that’s in your drawer?’ And he goes, ‘Sure, take it.’ And I took it, and I started making movies with it, and I started being as creative as I could, and never once in my life did my parents ever say, ’ What you’re doing is a waste of time.’ Never….. I know there are kids out there that don’t have that support system. So, if you’re out there and you’re listening, listen to me: If you wanna be creative, get out there and do it. It’s not a waste of time. — Michael Giacchino, upon receiving an Oscar for "best original score" for Up

 

 

I wonder if professional artists (in the big definition of artist sense) these days, faced with the pressures of time and opportunity and the siren song of their Facebook pages, feel the need to skip investing in their personal creative lives in order to put enough time into meeting their career aims. Is it an element out of balance? What impact might changing that up have on the lives and work of artists and the local communities they inhabit? — Molly Sheridan

 

 

MAY CAUSE RESTLESSNESS, ANXIETY, CONFUSION, ELEVATED PULSE, INDEPENDENT THOUGHT — advertisement for DISQUIETED: 28 Living Artist' View of the World We Live In, Portland Art Museum 2/20 - 5/16/2010

 

 

The pursuit of creativity is not generally a question that gets a good answer. . . Art is a mystery whose lineaments are often obscure to its protagonists. The artist – writer, painter, musician – does not like, indeed often cannot begin, to explain his or her work. That will be because, if genuine originality is at stake, the artist will probably be in two minds about what he or she is up to, and unwilling to offer an easy account. — Robert McCrum, The secret to creativity

 

 

Listening to music intelligently is more like knowing how to ride a bicycle than knowing why a bicycle is rideable. — Leonard B. Meyer, Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations

 

 

 

 

. . . all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed somesuffered even from melancholic disease. — Aristotle

 

 

Blind faith belongs in church, not in the concert hall where those who doubt or deny are excluded. The artist’s job is to ask questions, not to affirm. — Norman Lebrecht, Why Messaien doesn't raise my spirits

 

 

 

 

Creativity is kind of like pornography — you know it when you see it, — Rex Jung, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque

 

 

So democracy is great – except when it shapes the actual work of art. I do not believe a great work of art has ever been created by communal consensus, let alone by multiple editors. There will never be a wiki-masterpiece. This is because art, if it has any value at all, is the product of deep and often rationally incommunicable perceptions, and to try and explain or share those perceptions in a communally created artwork will negotiate and re-edit them to banality. — Jonathan Jones

 

 

Prodigies are much less likely to go on to become major famous creative geniuses than they are to become unheard-of and drop out . . . What it takes to become a prodigy is very different from what it takes to become a major creative adult. Most do not make that leap. — Ellen Winner, professor of psychology at Boston College [see New York Times 2/7/10]

 

 

. . . cool avoided conflict by resisting the pragmatic, by refusing to be results oriented: coolness was an end in itself, not a tool to achieve policies or goals. It was valued intrinsically for what it was, not for what rewards it earned. . . While it lasted, this probing within to "find one's self" — for all the ridicule and disbelief it engendered from the older generation — helped cool down the competitive antagonisms that have now jumped to the fore in all spheres of society. — Ted Gioia, The Birth and Death of the Cool

 

 

Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions. — Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition

 

 

. . . everyone is different. Or so they insist. . . Everyone who comes here has a certain talent and a certain ambition. Sometimes the ambition is consistent with the talent, sometimes not. Talent can exceed ambition, ambition— often — exceeds talent. — P.F. Kluge, Gone Tomorrow

 

 

 

If you chose to study composition, spend your time in school studying what you can’t learn in a club or a garage. If all you really want to do is play in a band, you’ll learn more playing in a club than you ever would in a classroom. Plus you’ll get to drink beer. — Annie Gosfield

 

 

. . . unlike the other animals, people do have a drive to seek coherence and meaning. We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty. Among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world. Individual responsibility is contained in the act of selecting and constantly revising the master narrative we tell about ourselves. — David Brooks

 

 

 

 

I do my creative work in an 18th-century barn on our farm near Boston, where I can pursue my ideas without the need to explain or translate until all is ripe and ready. — composer Tod Machover

 

 

 

 

We applaud and encourage elitism in sport. So why are we so uneasy with the notion when it comes to the arts? — Howard Goodall, Big Bangs: The Story of Five Discoveries that changed Musical History

 

 

How much art is required to give the impression of artlessness, how much control is necessary to seem natural? — Francine Prose, Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife

 

 

We ask ourselves, how could that stiff, dull, and awkward man compose such wildly imaginative poems, or that woman, who made a mess of her life, ever write so calmly and beautifully? The attraction of poems lies precisely in their never-to-be-fully-understood origins. If they are honest, most poets will admit that they are clueless about how their best poems got written. They live in hope that their work will turn out to be better than anything they could think of and imagine at the time of writing, thanks to the intervention of some higher force, or just dumb luck. — Charles Simic, The High-Wire Artist NYRB 10/22/2009

 

 

Finding the things that people haven't talked about and then talking about them is what writers and poets have always done. . . What I was trying to do as a novelist was to cause interruptions in time that were long enough to do justice to whatever piece of the world was before me. To think about it, to find out where it was funny and beautiful and then to put it on the page. — Nicholson Baker, Lifting Up the Madonna

 

 

 

 

The borders are our natural sites of creation . . . the places where we invent, transgress, and create. — Toni Morrison, unpublished speech delivered ar Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies 6/8/2007

 

 

The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation. — Michelle Obama

 

 

 

 

. . . the question . . . is not "What is art?" but "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?" — Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol

 

 

When the comforting echo of rhyme is removed, success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the order, is at once more apparent. — T. S. Eliot

 

 

 

 

Too often, we're sold transformations of the unreal. The life plans, guru weekends, self-help manuals, get rich/thin/happy programs are no different than upgrading the car/house/job/wife/boyfriend ethos that confuses surface activity with change. — Art isn't a surface activity. It comes from a deep place and it meets the wound we each carry. — Jeanette Winterson, In Praise of The Crack-Up

 

 

The single most important thing you can say about a work of art is that it is real, that the artist to whom it is attributed made it. Until you are certain that a work of art is authentic, it is impossible to say much else that is meaningful about it. The separation of the real from the fake is the cornerstone on which our understanding of any artist's work is based. — Richard Dorment, What Is an Andy Warhol?

 

 

One tries to re-create the complexity of life, but in a completely orderly way. I don't believe in chance during shooting. Chance is a gift of the moment, if that exists, but it's an exception. You have to prepare a chance for an actor, for instance, and push him into a certain situation. But I don't at all believe in the improvisational method. — Michael Haneke

 

 

 

 

The right to be rude is the salary that artists exact for telling the truth. — Honoré de Balzac, Envers de l'histoire contemporaine

 

 

By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered. — Charles Saatchi, interview

 

 

Now the world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger. — W. Somerset Maugham, Great Novelists and Their Novels

 

 

The truth in art starts in the human gut and works its upwards toward the brain. — Daniel Herwitz, Aesthetics: Key Concepts in Philosophy

 

 

It’s hard to do music and to make a mark in some way . . . It’s a serious job, and the world doesn’t understand it because they’ve seen entertainers so often, they think musicians are entertainers. But they’re not. — Keith Jarrett, interview with Stuart Nicholson

 

 

. . . all the leading scientists of the Romantic Age . . . started their lives as brilliant, unconventional, credulous, and adventurous amateurs. They blundered into science or literature in pursuit of ideas that were often absurd. They became sober professionals only after they had achieved success. — Freeman Dyson, When Science & Poetry Were Friends [NYRB 8/13/2009]

 

 

You can't predict how people will use things, and you can't force people to use them in the ways in which you've conceived of them, even if you're the inventor. . . expectations can get in the way of your own potential, either to create something or to use it effectively. — Douglas McLennan, diacritical 7/2/09

 

 

Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early. — Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm

 

 

You find the truth of the character, his 'spine' or 'trunk.' Where is the trunk that holds it all together? That's the truth. You've got to get the truth and then as you get older, the roots get thicker and stronger, so you can do more. — Karl Malden

 

 

The business world has lately co-opted the term [creativity] to explain product improvements and technological innovations. We've followed suit--many believe that anyone can be creative if they follow the right path, pattern, process, etc. The result--we privilege the creative over less glamorous ways of thinking and functioning. In a world in which everyone is creative, who will fix the plumbing? And why is that individual less interesting to us? Less valued? — Fritz McDonald

 

 

 

 

i can't count the number of great shows i've seen where all credibility died the moment i read the accompanying notes. — Julian Day

 

 

The advancement of the masses is a mere by-product of the uniquely human fact that discontent is at the root of the creative process: that the most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents. — Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change

 

 

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself? — Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood

 

 

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. — Elvis Costello

 

 

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences. — W. Somerset Maugham, The Circle

 

 

Older artists create a different kind of liberty than their younger contemporaries believe they have as birthright. This is a freedom that is more substantial: they realize that no matter what kind of art they make or in what style they make it they are accountable to absolutely no one but themselves. A sense of self-reference, of examining one's own life experience as a subject, often becomes an underlying preoccupation. . . — David Travis, At the Edge of Light: Thoughts on Photography & Photographers, on Talent & Genius

 

 

When I was a young designer, I wanted to change things. Then I realized to be a good designer, you have to be changed by things. — Michael Cronan

 

 

Sometimes I say that I (mostly) perform my own music to maintain its integrity. Sometimes I say that I perform my own music for practical reasons (It's easier than finding and relying on other performers), but more likely I am just a control-freak. — Corey Dargel

 

 

It is hard for many people to accept that dancing has nothing in common with music other than time and the division of time. — Merce Cunningham

 

 

One should not spend all his time on concepts. . . If you spend all your time thinking about it, you are in danger of becoming crazy. — John Stewart Bell, physicist

 

 

. . . there are innovators, and then there are just those that play. I'm just a player. A hired gun. I'm happy to just to be alive and playing now, I used to want to be Bird...now I just want to be paid!!! — Marshall McDonald

 

 

 

 

Sometimes, though, the professional outlook can become a disadvantage, preventing the very people who have the most at stake -- the professionals themselves -- from understanding major changes to the structure of their profession. — Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

 

 

When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace. — Anton Chekhov, letter to Maxim Gorky

 

 

 

 

"Anytime I'd get down about myself, get in a panic about wasting my life, applying for this grant, for that fellowship, working in some stupid restaurant to make ends meet, Ike was always there to pick me up. Say how we were both gonna make it, probably get inducted into the academy together, although I'm not exactly sure what academy he was referring to. He'd say, 'If you fold on me and take the law boards, I will kill you.' . . . He'd say, 'Don't begrudge the gigs that pay the bills, they're going to give you the life experience." — Richard Price, Lush Life

 

 

A Ballet dies with the fall of the curtain. Nobody knows whether the inner life that makes each ballet special will still be there next year, or even tomorrow. The text of a ballet’s steps may be preserved by film, notation or the often remarkable memories of dancers, but you can use all three and still find that what was a living work of theater has become a mausoleum. — Alastair MacAulay

 

 

To create consists precisely in not making useless combinations . . . Invention is discernment of choice. — Jules Henri Poincaré, Mathematical Creation

 

 

Pour inventer, il faut penser à côté, Jean-Marie Souriau

 

 

. . . what I discovered , not unsurprisingly, is that the mind must not be empty. The subconscious, or whatever we might call it, has to be occupied with the problem. From my own experience, I realized that it was necessary to "charge" myself for days, weeks, or even months, with as much as I could hold of the problem, and if I was still blocked, seek a release by doing something else. The best something else I found was sleep. Next to that, for some inexplicable reason, it was walking up the ramp at the Monroe Street underground parking garage. — David Travis, At the Edge of the Light: Thoughts on Photography & Photographers, on Talent & Genius

 

 

"Let me guess," Weiss said. You worked it out on a walk."

Bohm grinned. "I don't understand how anyone can think inside a building." — Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics was Reborn

 

 

"People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty, . . [As measured by brain activity] mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem. . . We often assume that if we don't notice our thoughts they don't exist. When we don't notice them is when we may be thinking most creatively." — Kalina Christoff, cognitive neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver

 

 

There's a quality in music that is outside of time, that is not related to time. And that has always fascinated me. — Robert Ashley

The privileged unconscious phenomena, those susceptible of becoming conscious, are those which . . . affect most profoundly our emotional sensibility. . . the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic feeling that all real mathematicians know, and surely it belongs to emotional sensibility. — Paul Valéry

 

 

There are hundreds of thousands of recipes out there, but few of them help you to be a better cook in any substantial way, In fact, they may hurt you as a cook by keeping you chained to recipes. — Michael Ruhlman, Ratio

 

 

Make Your Own Rules. — John Corigliano

 

 

"I just told you. House rules: Art first, everything else third. Guests are encouraged to reread those rules before requesting entry."

"But I like your work, " he tried feebly.

"Oh, thank you, thank you," she said, as sincerely thrilled as ever to receive praise. She stroked his face and kissed him softly. She whispered in his ear; "But you have three minutes to get the hell out of here so I can work." — Arthur Philips, Prague

 

 

No doubt, however, you smile at me and think that, after all, many a young whore turns into an old praying sister, and many a young revolutionary becomes an old reactionary. — Albert Einstein

 

 

The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant little water color you have there. — Russell Lynes, Snobs

 

 

In the 1950s following a concert, a reporter asked, "Mr. Kenton, where is jazz going from here?" "Well," Kenton said, "tomorrow night we'll be in Detroit."

 

 

Culture is more complicated. . . We're not as interested in the future as we used to be, certainly not the future as it looked in the 1950s. — Kieran Long, editor of the Architects' Journal

 

 

. . . the idea that technological progress equals artistic progress equals moral progress equals virtue, which leads to the kind of thinking that it's OK to go and build for a completely unpalatable regime and fuck up the planet for money, because you're working in your signature style and it's an expression of individual creativity. — Patrick Lynch of Lynch Architects (UK)

 

 

There is a huge group of people for whom it would seem a rather grim joke to talk of a period of creativity, but for those who are working, the opportunities are quite interesting and refreshing. . . There is this myth of the 'original,' whereas in reality people have never stopped doing things. We're just the latest. — Tom Emerson, Architect (UK)

 

 

If the world were clear, art would not exist. — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

 

 

Some instrumental parts were written in 5/8 and others in 2/8. I started beating time in 5/8, whereupon the binary musicians began to gesticulate at me to show their discomfort. What was I to do? OK, I said, I will conduct 5/8 with my right hand and 2/8 with my left. I was so delighted with my newly found ambidextrous technique that I applied it in other pieces as well, notably in the second movement of Ives' 'Three Place in New England,' played on the first of the two Parisian concerts. Someone quipped that my conducting was evangelical, for my right hand knew not what my left hand was doing. — Nicholas Slonimsky, conducting the European premiere of Wallingford Riegger's "Three Canons" for flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon.

 

Gods and angels do not come bearing perfectly formed theories to disembodied prophets who instantly write textbooks. — Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement

 

I very much disapprove of the adage that you have to feel the performance completely every night on the stage. This is technically an impossibility, and really is the negation of the art of acting. The art of acting, after all, is not actual feeling but simulation of feeling, and it is impossible to feel a strong emotional part eight performances a week, including two matinées. — Noël Coward

 

Practice, if simply viewed as repetition, does not make perfect but merely permanent. . . Individual attention to novel distinctions and subtle nuances appears to alter the process of creative ensemble performance and lead to music that is more enjoyable to perform and hear. — Ellen Langer, Orchestral performance and the footprint of mindfulness

 

 

During the 1940's, the U.S. Armed Forces were conducting nuclear experiments in the New Mexico desert. The Manhattan Project's goal was to build the atomic bomb. During those experiments, the radiation contaminated the soil, and new babies were being born with five legs. When those unfortunate mutants were of the age to go dance in discotheques and clubs, they realized that all the music around is designed for people to dance to with two legs, so I wrote "Mission: Impossible" for them. After all, my endeavor was nothing new since toward the end of the nineteenth century there were sightings of flying saucers that descended in central Europe, and they were flown by aliens who had three legs. This fact influenced Johann Strauss and Franz Lehar to compose right here in Austria the waltz, which is in 3/4. — Lalo Schifrin when asked by the leading classical music critic in Vienna "Why did you write 'Mission: Impossible' in 5/4 rhythm?"

 

 

A new writer is sometimes like a new baby in the family. He arrives from the unknown, and his family has to find a way to connect with him, to make him less "dangerous" in his newness and mystery. The relatives lean over the infant's crib, peer at him closely, and say, "Look, look, he has Uncle Jacob's nose! His chin is exactly like Aunt Malka's!" Something similar happens when you first become an author. Everybody rushes to tell you who has influenced you, from whom you have learned, and, of course, from whom you have stolen. — David Grossman, New Yorker 6/8&15/2009

 

Picasso never had to explain that his mistresses weren’t actually cubic. — Donald G. McNeil Jr.

 

And what is art? In third grade, I felt I knew. An artwork was any useless, random object created in order to break up the school day and then toted home to show off to one's parents, after which it was misplaced or thrown away. — Walter Kirn, Lost in the Meritocracy

 

God forbid we should accidently encounter a work of art that somehow rocks our world and shakes us out of our settled expectations. — Ken Foster, executive director of Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, San Francisco

 

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. . . The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. . . Allen Tate, the poet and critic, complained that “the academically certified Creative Writer goes out to teach Creative Writing, and produces other Creative Writers who are not writers, but who produce still other Creative Writers who are not writers.” — Louis Menand

 

 

When I was at the Royal College of Art they were abandoning drawing and were just linking it to photography, but digital photography is now leaning back towards drawing and painting. . . People think of computer art as having a certain look – it doesn't. The phrase 'digital art' I always thought was rather debatable. It's like saying 'pencil art'. . . There are advantages and disadvantages to anything new in mediums for artists, but the speed allowed here with colour is something new. Swapping brushes in the hand with oil or watercolour takes time. — David Hockney, Drawing in a Printing Machine

 

 

Convince People to Buy Your Work. Everybody knows the real reason artists make art is to make money. Anyone who tells you “I paint to breathe” or “I live to create digital images” or “Without art I am just a tricked out cell phone without a soul” is delusional and should be institutionalized. . . Price according to the amount of time you spent on the work. In other words, the less time you spent on the piece, the more you should charge. . . Don’t appear desperate and clingy. Selling artwork is like getting a date. The more aloof you appear, the more sales you will make. — Beth Secor, The Ten List: The Ins and Outs of Openings

 

 

There's a tendency for classical music aficionados to assume that composers are always and only themselves: Beethoven always Beethoven, Brahms always Brahms, Ives always Ives. The reality is that those composers, like all worthwhile artists, have gone through a more or less extended journey to escape from their models and to find a voice, to discover who they are. Part of the process of discovering who you are is finding why you are: What you want to say, why you're an artist in the first place. — Jan Swafford, Why you should listen to Charles Ives

 

 

One calls something interesting precisely so as not to have to commit to a judgment of beauty (or of goodness). — Susan Sontag, An Argument About Beauty

 

 

Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick. — from The TED Commandments

 

 

They're getting into it. They're trying to get into the act. But the questions that they're asking are like, they want to know ... the effect of square or round shapes or things like that. And I keep saying, you know, 'Get a life. That's not the issue.' The issue, the real issue ... is why do we do it? Why did Mahler do that stuff? And why do people love it? How does it nurture us? To understand the importance of it in our lives and what it does for our children and our world and our daily existence: That's the issue. Why? We need it. So why deny that? I think these efforts, to whether it's circle or square, is a denial mechanism. — Frank Gehry on the subject of neuroscientists' recent investigations of creativity

 

 

The emotions you get from listening to Mozart are like the faint glimpses of ultimate reality we get from quantum experiments. I claim nothing more. — Bernard d'Espagnat

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be. — Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook

 

 

. . . it often seems there's some sort of vestigial guild mentality in the music world that seeks to make the simple complex to the uninitiated . . . — Lyle Sanford

 

 

A psychotic is someone who doesn't hear a voice at the last minute saying, "Today it doesn't matter." — Susan Sontag, Baby

 

 

Art that bewilders one generation becomes accessible to the next; or so it would seem. . . But, while I'm delighted that once esoteric art has found a popular audience. . . I also think it is important that we don't dilute the artist's vision. . . Accessibility is fine; but, in making once-difficult art available to a wider audience, we also need to honour its integrity and respect its uncompromising values. — Michael Billington

 

 

"Creativity is the willingness to make mistakes and art is knowing which ones to keep." — quoted by photographer Robert Bengtson

 

 

All we composers really have to work with is time and sound - and sometimes I'm not even sure about sound. — Morton Feldman

 

 

I have always thought of people who tried to invent languages as about as sane and practical as the mad scientists in the movies who try to create life. Less self-destructive, perhaps. Presumably, no group of fear-crazed villagers will come to burn down your castle because they are afraid of your verb structure. — Daniel L. Everett

 

Music — can often be an athletic event — devoid of any Music. — Ray Pizzi

 

A young artist can't be until the end of his life a young artist. If you don't change, you're lost — Eckhard Schneider

 

I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. — Vladimir Nabokov

 

Nobody criticizes a fish because it can't ride a bicycle. — Regina Hackett

 

 

The tape does lie and nearly always gets away with it. — Glenn Gould

 

 

What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common? The propensity to link seemingly unrelated things. It's called metaphor. So what I'm arguing is, if the same gene, instead of being expressed only in the fusiform gyrus, is expressed diffusely through the brain, you've got a greater propensity to link seemingly unrelated brain areas in concepts and ideas. So it's a very phrenological view of creativity. — Dr. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, neurologist U.C.S.D.

 

 

Ah, yes, my brilliant idea . . . however did I come up with it? Well, that's an interesting story. The short answer is that I have no idea. The longer answer is that I really have no idea. And, of course, many people won't think the idea is that brilliant; they'll just wonder why the hell I've veered off the track for seventy-five pages and hurl my poor book across the room. — Arthur Philips

 

 

Don't believe your own bulls––t. — Raina Kelley

 

 

It's the most absurd thing you could imagine. . . But the whole job is so completely absurd. There's that, and there's the humiliation of two people showing up at a reading. So you keep your perspective. — Andrew Sean Greer

 

 

To be mildly manic depressive or mildly schizophrenic brings a flexibility of thought, an openness, and risk-taking behaviour, which does have some adaptive value in creativity. The price paid for having those traits is that some will have mental illness. — Gordon Claridge, emeritus professor of abnormal psychology at Oxford University

 

 

Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing. — Eugène Delacroix

 

 

The underlying traits linked with mild psychopathology enhance creative ability. In severe form, they are debilitating. — Emilie Glazer, experimental psychologist

 

Composers, like pearls, are of three chief sorts, real, artificial and cultured. — Virgil Thomson

 

 

Most artists, of course, are perfectly happy to leave well enough alone, secure in the knowledge that they got it right the first time (even if they didn't). On the other hand, revised versions of well-known works of art are quite a bit more common than you might suppose, and it turns out that more than a few great artists were near-compulsive tinkerers. . . But . . . there's no such thing as perfection, not even in the ideal world of art. In that respect, if no other, the greatest of geniuses are just like the rest of us working stiffs. All they can do is aim high and hope for the best -- and sometimes they, too, long for a second chance to hit the target. — Terry Teachout , Tinkering With the Ideal

 

 

Look, I knocked around a long time. I think more people are hurt by success at a young age than failure. — Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music

 

 

Every artist has a right to fail. . . failure is important. Without it, artists can't grow and our feeling for the culture around us remains stagnant and quickly becomes predictable. — Chloe Veltman

 

 

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never! —Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure

 

 

You can't hammer a nail over the Internet. — Alan Blinder, Prinston economist

 

 

As an artist — and I believe I am a thinking artist, not hopefully a mindless artist — it doesn't bother me that I don't know everything about either the creative process or its progeny. I am happy to know that it works, and that in the main I can rely on it and the way it functions. The fact that there are unrevealed and incomprehensible mysteries in the creative-arts process and in our evaluation of its products does not disturb me, although it arouses my curiosity. But I don't have to know how something works in order to use it. — Gunther Schuller, Musings

 

 

Difficult writing seems, on the one hand, to serve the authoritarian, self-indulgent writer and exclude the rest of us while, on the other hand, it claims to challenge the cliches of mass culture by provoking us to look at the world in a radically new way. These two opposing arguments get to the heart of a question that has haunted democracies for more than a hundred years: is popular culture really the best, most beneficial culture for a democracy? Many would claim that the transparent, easily accessible language and styles of popular media have the potential to engage a genuinely democraticized citizenry, but others counter that a corporate and consumer-driven mass culture homogenizes public discourse so effectively that it ultimately poses a threat to democracy itself. — Caroline Levine, The art of the impenetrable

 

 

. . . buildings can have a beautiful silence that I associate with attributes such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence, and integrity, and with warmth and sensuousness as well; a building that is being itself, being a building, not representing anything, just being. . .If you look at the Earth without architecture, it's sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter ... whether it's a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains — architect Peter Zumthor

 

 

Other People's Opinion Syndrome (OPOS for short) is a common complaint among arts lovers. OPOS is the problem of letting yourself be swayed or influenced by what people are saying about a particular work of art before you go and experience it for yourself. Inevitably, our impressions of a film or piece of theatre, music, dance or exhibition can't help but be affected by the expectations that we've built up in our minds based on other people's reactions to the work of art. . . OPOS is an insidious thing. It seeps into and informs our view of art almost unconsciously. But it isn't all-powerful. With a bit of practice, I believe it's possible to hear different viewpoints on a work of art and then go and experience it for yourself without letting OPOS spoil the experience. — Chloe Veltman

 

 

Don't be frightened. Mr. Gould is here. He will appear in a moment. I'm not, um, as you know, in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I've ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms' dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould's conception and this raises the interesting question: "What am I doing conducting it?" I'm conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too. — Leonard Bernstein, April 1962

 

 

The popular mythology of creative genius depends on beloved stereotypes of the artist in youth and old age: the misunderstood upstart who forces us to see the world afresh; and the revered sage who shows us depths of insight attainable only through a lifetime of hard-won experience. Thrilling though it is to watch a young contender take the world by storm, nothing heartens cognoscenti of a certain age more than an established artist whose last works . . . convey what Edward Said, in his posthumously published meditation On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, described as "an unearthly serenity" . . . But one man's serenity is another's senility. . . Just as the career tangents of even the greatest artists follow no uniform pattern, not all final masterworks conform to popular notions of geriatric nirvana. — Martin Filler, NYRB 6/11/09

 

 

History says, Don't hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme. — Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy

 

 

Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see. — Arthur Schopenhauer

 

 

Playing the piano is easy, if everything goes well. — Rudolf Serkin

 

 

 

First novels belong in the basement. There’s got to be something frightening for the children to discover, some reason for them to dare each other to go down there. . . The manuscript should be placed in a spot of the basement that’s prone to flooding, because a flood hitting the manuscript on which you wasted your youth is kind of biblical. . . Every so often, you’ll be struck by idea that maybe your novel isn’t as bad as you remember. That’s why you’ve got to keep it in the basement, so you can go down there, read a few pages, and disabuse yourself of that notion. — Jenny Shank

 

Your first book is just your idea of what a book is. — David Carr

 

Art isn’t easy, but booing is. A mind-closing activity, it tends to be the expression of rigidity in the face of invention. Artists are almost never booed for incompetence . . . They are booed for intent and out of partisanship. . . Not everything works, but at least in the noncommercial realm of the concert stage and the opera house, I credit nearly everyone with trying to say something. And when they actually manage to, the meaning may not immediately sink in. — Mark Swed, LA Times 4/25/09

 

I always doubt I’m always groping. If you’re too pleased with what you’ve done, or you get into a routine, that’s the worst. Sometimes I go out on a limb, so it doesn’t happen. — Argentine pianist Martha Argerich

 

 

Taking a poll is no way to judge whether a work of art should survive. — Claes Oldenburg

 

 

It is more blessed to ask for forgiveness than for permission. — Jesuit Credo (see Frank Wilczek: The Lightness of Being: Mass, Either, and the Unification of Forces

 

 

Writing fiction takes me out of time. — David Foster Wallace

 

 

The prudent man is needed to press the world's suits, and its lawsuits. But the bridges and the literary masterpieces and the highest excellence of all kinds start with the gambler - who knows that life is fraught with chance, and gladly takes the risk. —Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle 12/19/1963

 

 

She [singer-pianist Shirley Horn] never made me feel bad about what I did, but it never felt exactly right. It was like stabbing myself with daggers every night. . . . It was like being a student of Picasso and he says, "Hey, I got this painting job and I can't finish it. I need you to finish it." . . . You can't say no, can you? — pianist-arranger George Mesterhazy

 

 

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. — John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

 

 

. . . you don't just stand in the wings and then come on; your life has been going on and goes on when you exit. You're a continuum. — Donald Mahler

 

 

Jazz musicians have two fundamental goals: creating music that keeps listeners wondering what’s next, and finding a novel context within which to explore old truths. (There are no new truths.) — Gary Giddins, New Yorker 3/2/2009

 

 

People look at an abstract painting and ask, 'What's it supposed to be? What's the point?' Hell, it's a painting, that's the point. It's not supposed to be anything. Its job is to get you to look in a different way. That's also what actors are supposed to do. Provide a stimulating point of departure for thought and feeling. — Jack Nicholson

 

 

We know what a great painting looks like while we are looking at one. Turning away, we don't exactly forget, but our recall of the experience — how we felt, looking — starts to edit what we saw. Some details and qualities are magnified; others evanesce. With time, the picture becomes ever more ours and less the painter's. — Peter Schjeldahl

 

 

Often, in playing music, pragmatism can be very useful. Just do it! — Bruce Brubaker, PianoMorphosis

 

The urge to be Number One belongs to the sports field. An artist is supposed to express inner truths, not to dream of being the fastest, loudest and most famous. — Norman Lebrecht, La Scena Musicale April 8, 2009

 

 

How do I know what I think till I see what I say? — E.M. Forster

 

 

As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time. — Bill Evans, liner notes for the "Kind of Blue" album

 

 

Greatness in or about art has little to do with being right. It has most to do with telling a story that imprints itself on the eyes and brains of your contemporaries. — Peter Schjeldahl NYRB 3/12/2009

 

 

. . . the big commonality between psychiatry and jazz, that kind of discourse and empathy with the people you're with that allows you to sometimes even lose the positional sense of the self. You get so involved with the activity that it becomes pure activity. That's what ecstasy means — being outside oneself. If you can get into an ecstatic state, it means losing your own boundary for the moment. — Denny Zeitlin, Downbeat Magazine 9/04

 

 

Labels are for the things men make, not for men. — Rex Stout

 

 

When I look at a painting for the first time, I never ask myself whether or not it is a good painting or even whether or not I like it. It is almost painful for me to answer the question: "What do you think of it?" Thinking of it impedes my seeing it. — Harold Clurman

 

 

My music has bad notes and good notes, and when I conduct it one hears only the good notes, but when you conduct it, I hear all the notes. — Richard Strauss to Arturo Toscanini

 

 

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. — Samuel Beckett

 

 

My music is not modern; it's just badly played. — Arnold Schoenberg

 

 

A "masterpiece" ("chef-d'oeuvre") is the work that an apprentice completes at the end of his training to show that he has learned the secrets of his trade. — Graham Robb, Cruising with Genius (NYRB 2/26/2009)

 

 

There are two basic kinds of art - there is entertainment and serious art. The job of the first is to reach out, of the second to pull us in. — Sofia Gubaidulina

 

 

For reasons that are obscure to me, those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians. In our artists we look for the many-colored voice, the multiple sensibility. . .From our politicians, though, we still look for ideological heroism, despite everything. We consider pragmatists to be weak. We call men of balance naive fools. — Zadie Smith, Speaking in Tongues

 

 

Architecture students should be exposed to the widest possible range of contemporary ideas in order to find their own way. In the process, they will learn the most important lesson of architectural history: There are no right and wrong styles, only well- and poorly conceived buildings. — Witold Rybczynski, Why are architects so obsessed with schools and rules?

 

 

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant. — Cary Grant

 

 

"Masterclass" -- the term makes me queasy. We had masters and slaves! . . . So, I studied with a teacher who studied with a teacher who studied with a teacher who studied with a teacher who studied with Beethoven! Or (more shocking?), I studied with a teacher who studied with Arnold Schoenberg. What a game. — Bruce Brubaker

 

 

I don't work all the time. . . It's true, though, that I often work at times when other, saner people might well choose to do something else. — Terry Teachout, Looking for trouble

 

 

When we say that a warehouse should be a fine thing architecturally, we do not mean that it should have the appearance of a palace. It must not suggest anything except a warehouse. . . designs, as we know, are only a means to an end. ... Now it is quite possible for a design to be well composed, proportioned, scaled and detailed, and yet to fail as fine architecture. — Darcy Braddell, How to Look at Buildings (1932)

 

 

If you have any originality, you must first dig it out. If you don't have any, you must get some. — Gustave Flaubert

 

 

There is always a certain amount of snobbery about culture, and sometimes it is pernicious (and we pretend to like what we secretly detest), but sometimes it is useful and we get hooked on a new style that will give us pleasure for years to come. — Alex Ross, NYRB 3/12/2009

 

 

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. . . To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius. — Lukas Foss

 

 

Music, by its nature, is communal. Musicians playing together form a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and the presence of an audience gives heft to what otherwise might be mere noodling. Art, by its nature, is a solitary process, a lone figure standing before a canvas, waiting for inspiration to strike. What they share is the restless desire to create, to speak in a language beyond words. Each takes its share of inspiration from the other: music's heroic intensity, art's unfettered expression. For many musicians, and many artists, the two are inseparable halves of the same whole.— Saul Austerlitz, At the intersection of music and visual art

 

 

Everything has been thought of before; the task is to think of it again. — Goethe

 

 

Art is emotional ambiguity and intellectual complexity, among many other things. — Harvey Sachs

 

 

A great work of art is made out of a combination of obedience and liberty – Nadia Boulange

 

 

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate — William of Ockham (1285–1347/49)

 

 

What is perceived as product by others is process from the artist's perspective. . . To be honored in midstream for one's labor would be ideal, but impossible; to be honored after the fact is always too late, for by then another project has begun, another concatenation of indefinable states. . . One is frequently asked whether the process becomes easier, with the passage of time, and the reply is obvious: Nothing gets easier with the passage of time, not even the passing of time. Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the "self" see the "self" with any objectivity? . . . We know how we feel about ourselves, but only from hour to hour; our moods change, like the intensity of light outside our windows. — Joyce Carol Oats, The Faith of a Writer

 

 

Too much hermetic solitude can divorce one from the realities of music-making causing one to forget that music is ultimately an act of communication that requires a complex web of personal interactions. — John Adams, Hallelujah Junction

 

 

From things that have happened and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. — Ernest Hemingway

 

 

Can you imagine Consumer Reports reviewing art? — Daniel Grant, Asking the Artist for a Do-Over

 

 

I would be convinced that I could write as they did, rather in the way that someone viewing an abstract painting might be innocent enough to think he could do such a painting himself. Or rather, I was like an artist who, upon looking at a painting he admires, thinks he has figured out how it was done. In much the same way as that artist might rush back to his studio to prove the point, I would go at once to my desk to write poetry. — Orhan Pamuk, My Turkish Library

 

 

The people who influence you aren't necessarily who you're going to write like, but the fact of their existence, of the existence of their characters, the spirit in them, opens up a possibility in your mind. — novelist & filmmaker John Sayles

 

 

. . . the quest is always there. I can sit down at the piano and just look at it for hours. — Gil Evans

 

 

Style is a very simple matter, it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. — Virginia Woolf

 

 

Jazz texts merely codify what jazz composers stylistically choose to use from the entirety of the European pallet--and much has unfortunately been left out, or rather not yet assimilated, such as most of the music of the Twentieth century. . . Jazz musicians and their audiences are unfortunately mired in old European harmonic practices and forms. . . Greek modal names are applied to a tonal chord system that is in no way modal. Jerry Coker, who was one of the very first to hold a full-time position as Jazz Professor in a college or university. . . admitted to me that he used [the] modal system . . . to impress the classical administrators that dominated the music department—so that they might take jazz education seriously. — Ed Byrne, [see also]

 

 

I always write the middle of the piece before I start. . . The composer can't tell you what he meant; he wrote that out in his notes. — Elliott Carter, interviewed by Charlie Rose 12/10/08 on the eve of his 100th birthday.

 

 

I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of paint." — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

 

 

The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill or a train. — Walter Benjamin, Doctrine of the Similar

 

 

In defense of the imposition of style, I think we've all been confronted with student compositions that are lifeless, and as a teacher, you cast about for things to jumpstart a sketch. Urging a student to imitate a style we admire isn't all that different than assigning a student to write a fugue or a theme and variations, which are both standard composition assignments. When that crosses into dogma, you've got a problem. — Joseph Drew

 

 

When she began making her own dances in the mid-'60s, she says, she expected her work would be hated. So to avoid boos, she and her dancers took no curtain calls -- for five years. The curtain fell, lights came up, end of show. . . "Well, it's an old story. It's called independence. It begins with Mozart. Haydn wasn't liberated. Haydn accepted that he ate in the kitchen with the servants and he wore the livery. Mozart wanted to eat at the table. It's about having control over the work that you do and controlling what you will do, and that is part and parcel of having the wherewithal to do it." — Twyla Tharp, interviewed by Sarah Kaufman [Washington Post, 12/7/2008]

 

I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music . . . though I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing the musical material to run through them, once the process is set up and loaded, it runs by itself. — Steve Reich, Music as a Gradual Process.

 

 

I do not know of any more profound difference in the whole orientation of an artist than this, whether he looks at his work in progress (at "himself") from the point of view of the witness, or whether he "has forgotten the world," which is the essential feature of all monological art; it is based on forgetting, it is the music of forgetting. — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

 

 

. . . keeping in touch with new composers. I encourage them, and then I find out if there’s anything they are doing that is worth stealing. — Pierre Boulez

 

 

Reality has never looked anything like a photograph. — Daniel Kehlmann, Me and Kaminski

 

 

Unless you’re involved with thinking about what you’re doing, you end up doing the same thing over and over, and that becomes tedious and, in the end, defeating. When artists make art, they shouldn’t question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another. — Sol LeWitt

 

 

People often underestimate what it takes to be a writer. If only they had the free time to put pen to paper, they could dash off the Great American Novel in a matter of weeks. Why don't these people think it's so easy to be a firefighter, an astronaut or surgeon? If only they had the leisure to wrestle a hose, spin in an antigravity machine or attend medical school. — Linda Burnett

 

Shostakovich had to wait a whole quarter of a century after completing his Fourth Symphony before he could hear it performed. Bach had to wait 110 years before the first complete performance of his B minor Mass, by which time he had long since departed to the great choral extravaganza in the sky. For today's composers, though, the elapsed time between composition and performance can be a matter of seconds – as long as you are willing to accept that your performers may not be entirely, you know, real. — Tristan Jakob-Hoff, Why Shostakovich needed a laptop

 

 

The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment. — Robert Benchley, "How to Get Things Done"

 

 

Harsh words from critics, now and forever a click away on the Internet, can harrow. This seems pretty plain, I know. But, amazingly, I had never really given this much thought until one day last spring when I wanted to put my head in the oven and kill myself because of a wretched review. . . Alas, reviews have no real use in actual creative activity. . . I didn’t learn anything from the content of the review. But I learned enormously from my response to it. — choreographer David Parker, Knocked Sideways

 

 

I don't like it at the piano. I can't wait to get to the desk [where] you don't need your imagination anymore. It's just math from then on, you know. Sitting at the piano you're just at a loss. You just don't remember what music is and why the notes are put together in any way whatsoever, you have no ideas, and that's just the most horrible part, or you have a great piece, and you don't know what the ending could possibly be, it just won't end." — Carla Bley, quoted in Alex Stewart, Making the Scene: Contemporary New York City Big Band Jazz

 

 

Usually when someone says a thing is too simple they're saying that certain familiar things aren't there . . . But actually there may be several new things to which they aren't paying attention. These may be quite complex . . . — Donald Judd

 

 

Behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen — G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

 

 

Melodies are texts created by men and improved by women — Isḥāq al-Mawṣilī (b Arrajan, 767; d Baghdad, March 850)

 

 

How is what is new in an artwork to be characterized and interpreted in a way that avoids reducing the qualities of the outcome to aesthetic values that were accepted in the past? — Carl R. Hausman

 

 

I believe that one tradition spawns another. I believe in tradition in life in general, not fashion. I don't think that a new message falls from the sky and the light bulb goes on and suddenly there's another whole new aesthetic. I think the best art comes from the best art. — Helen Frankenthaler

 

 

The instance of technology changing aesthetics isn't confined to the Industrial Revolution. . . In fact, we're in the midst of another such period today, and for many of the same reasons.The same digital methods used to design cars are used in practically all manufacturing industries today. Inevitably, the comparative ease of creating complex forms by computer affects the design of these products - just as the ease of churning out ornament during the Industrial Revolution encouraged its rampant use and eventual overuse.

Alas, among today's product designers, the unfettered power to create complexity seems to have brought on a corresponding terror of simple lines and clear-cut themes. Instead, objects ranging from copiers to computers to coffeemakers are loaded with gratuitous curves, bulges and distortions that contribute nothing but baffling visual chaos. – architect Arrol Gellner, San Francisco Chronicle 11/8/08

 

 

A friend of mine recently expressed surprise learning I still composed by hand. He said he didn’t, and that composing on the computer has influenced his work. Electronic music software aside, I’m not sure how a notation program actually can influence the musical content of a composition. Sure notation software makes certain things easier. But how exactly does using a computer change one’s musical style?

And, please: I hope answers don’t consist in “cutting and pasting” and “mass mover tool.” Surely the urge to repeat chunks of music is not encouraged by computer short cuts. Furthermore, many complex rhythms are easier to write out by hand; does notation software discourage rhythmic complexity? – David Salvage

 

 

In science, most bright ideas turn out to be false and are quickly discarded by their originators; perhaps the same is true in art. The original and the new are not in short supply. What is in short supply is the judgment and the persistence necessary to take a momentary flash, or fortunate gift, and turn it into something more permanent, into something that will signify in the whole tradition. — I. C. Jarvie

 

 

My way seems to be to work, move on, and then go back. — playwright David Rabe

 

 

With young artists expected and encouraged to be plugged-in polymaths happily jerry-rigging signifiers, the notion of formal innovation within a medium feels more dated than ever. — Jesse Jarnow, San Francisco Chronicle 11/19/08

 

 

It’s always fun to watch people who are completely obsessed with what they’re doing. — Helen Hood Scheer, Filmmaker, Interview in Anchorage Daily News

 

 

A picture is worth a thousand 1s and 0s, and vice versa. — Giles Fauconnier & Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities

 

 

When I was eighteen I got a chance to go to the East Coast to visit my Aunt Mary in Baltimore. I had been composing for about four years then but had not heard any of it played. Aunt Mary was going to introduce me to some friend of hers (an Italian gentleman) who was connected with the symphony there. . . She said, "This is Frankie. He writes orchestra music." The guy said, "Really? Tell me, sonny boy, what's the lowest note on a bassoon?" I said, "B flat . . .and also it says in the book you can get 'em up to a C or something in the treble clef." He said, "Really? You know about violin harmonics?" I said, "What's that?" He said, "See me again in a few years." – Frank Zappa, Edgard Varese: The Idol of My Youth

 

 

Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

 

 

The patience, the mildness, the taste for conformity that seemed prerequisites for a tolerable life were beyond me. — Bruce McCall, Thin Ice

 

When it comes to art, watch out for thinking. — Clement Greenberg

 

 

Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. — Robert Irwin

 

 

When the freshness wears off, I have to find something else to do or else I'm not stimulated. . . I don't want to be a museum piece. I don't want people to come out and hear me because it's nostalgic. — Tony Williams

 

 

I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over. I come into the studio very fearfully, I creep in to see what happened the night before. — Philip Guston

. . . the first step toward finding out is to acknowledge [that] you do not satisfactorily know already. — Charles Sanders Peirce

 

 

. . . the notion that a jazz composition might enhance your understanding of the way cancer cells divide is not really any more far-fetched than the idea that "Take the A Train" puts you in the right frame of mind for the subway. — Paul Goldberger, New Yorker 12/01/2008

 

 

For every measure that goes fairly freely, there are twenty that stifle under the weight of a single tradition whose lazy, hypocritical influence I detect in spite of my efforts. Note, it is little help that this tradition belongs to myself. — Claude Debussy

 

 

He was always uncertain. He could work fast . . . But he was habitually hesitant, slow to make his choices. — William W. Austin discussing Debussy

 

 

There is no objective principle of Taste possible — Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement [1892]

 

 

A step into unknown territory need not always proceed on a technical foundation, and it need not necessarily be directed "forward." (Who can say which direction is "forward"?) It might even be undertaken with means that seem, in the mist, in the limited visibility of our epoch, obsolete or "useless," . . . The question "where do we stand today?" can be answered only thus: each one stands in another place. On his own feet. — Hans Werner Henze, Essays

 

 

Tastes change; truths become clichés; whole art forms disappear. — Julian Barnes

 

 

In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. . . I have never made trials or experiments. – Pablo Picasso

 

 

I seek in painting. – Paul Cézanne

 

 

The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition. . . On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. – Malcolm Gladwell, Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?

 

 

 

 

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra--not choreography to the audience. — George Szell (quoted in Newsweek, Jan. 28, 1963)

 

 

You have to impose your will - not with a hammer, but you have to be able to convince people of your point of view. — Pierre Boulez

 

 

. . . in process of grappling with the work of art, of trying to make sense of it, self-doubt is what forces us to maintain contact with our perceptions, to keep going back to the work to find confirmation. . . No work of art is static. It is constantly renewed through the perceptions of those who remake it through the work of interpretation. — Guy Dammann, Relax. You might just enjoy yourselves.

 

 

I sometimes hear a piece of mine and there will be moments in it that are better than I thought they'd be. And then there will be moments when I think I should have done better. The only thing that always works is mediocrity. As soon as you try for the bull's eye you could also miss the whole target. – André Previn

 

 

We live in a time I think not of mainstream, but of many streams, or even, if you insist upon a river of time, that we have come to delta, maybe even beyond delta to an ocean which is going back to the skies. — John Cage, KPFA radio, 1992

 

 

Music is the best way we have of digesting time – Igor Stravinsky

 

 

. . . what am I supposed to be looking for, and they said you look at things that help you solve problems. It's not easy and it wasn't easy; it took a long time to really begin to be able to look. —Brice Marden

 

 

Misunderstand me correctly —Jean Sibelius

 

 

One can play rapidly and cleanly only by learning how to come off a piano key or how to release the finger on a string or a valve. In the same way, mentally, we need to let go of a problem, usually temporarily, in order to see better what it's about, then take hold of it afresh. — Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

 

 

 

 

Genius does not solve problems, it does not answer questions, it does not devise ideas, for problems are mere symptoms, questions are simply mice, and ideas are only splinters. Genius knows nothing of these fragments, these piecemeals. Its curiosity is global, its grasp is comprehensive, its reach unimpeded by self-restraint, by self-doubt, by self-perpetuating inability. It does not address—it steps back and transforms. . . Its works are worlds unto themselves—they are complete and self-contained acts of imagination. — Mark Daniel Cohen, Michelangelo: A Rage to Create

 

 

The purpose of perfecting technique is not for getting closer to the representation of the object, but, to the contrary to detach it as far as possible to make of it - its own object - a thing unto itself. — Giorgio de Chirico

 

 

If a solo is going well, developing, I let it go on its own. Then I've reached that place where I've gotten out of my own way, and it's as if I'm standing back and watching the solo play itself. —Jim Hall

 

 

It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel. — Jackson Pollock

 

 

I feel that music should be left alone and not be used as a tool for peoples' ideas . . . to make propaganda, to make masterpieces, to force it to live in mud huts . . . But a person should have a rapport with the sound world around him. And actually, I am manipulated. I hate manipulation. Every time I try to manipulate my work, for what I think is a terrific idea, the work drops dead. After working so many years, I'm not even allowed to manipulate. I know in a minute I'd hear my music screaming HELP! — Morton Feldman

 

 

I generally mistrust any advance "feelings" that I am trying to express in my work; for me, it is preferable to have new emotions emerge in the process of doing the work. It difficult enough to escape conventional thinking - how much more difficult to stay clear of conventional feelings . . . As artists, we wish to be reborn with each situation. — Wolf Kahn

 

 

I have to take care that the right things are getting most of the light. It’s like setting small things so that when they are part of the big wholeness that things are in the right place. Harmony’s a great word, there’s no harmony if those small things are in wrong place. So think a long line, but make sure that the long line is built correctly with the small things. Hey, I go with what [Jean] Sibelius said, my countryman. He said that the right way to play music is so all those small pieces of food—meat, fish, or whatever—they have to swim inside of the sauce. That’s a simple, but a great way to say it. If you have only pieces of meat, or if you have so much sauce that you cannot see the smaller pieces, it’s not correct. But some kind of blend, and the sauce is pulling the thing together. – Osmo Vänskä

 

 

The best in art can hardly be discerned through rules; it must be discovered in a sustained experience of serious looking and judging, with all the risks or error. — Meyer Schapiro

 

 

I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena. As a child, I was tremendously impressed by the qualities and character of the granite I found in Burgundy, where I often visited my grandfather...So I was always in touch with things of stone and with this kind of pure structural architecture--without frills or unnecessary decoration. All of this became an integral part of my thinking at a very early stage. – Edgard Varèse, Interview with Gunther Schuller

 

 

If an artist can translate the meaning and purpose of a work into easily understandable words, it means one of two things. Either the artist is lying . . . or the artist is a fool. — Jonathan Jones

 

Some of them are about three minutes and some about five minutes. — Bob Dylan when asked what his songs are about

 

 

The best way to make a bad work of art is to try to make a great one. — [Terry] Teachout's First Law of Artistic Dynamics

 

 

Creativity requires a certain tolerance for frustration. — Alan Belkin, composer

 

 

. . . real performance is as creative an act as composition . . . a logical continuation of the composition, carrying creation through from thought to physical expression. — Susan Langer

 

 

Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must alas lay down its arms. — Sigmond Freud

 

 

Chronology counts! — Meyer Schapiro

 

 

The higher an artistic ideal stands, the greater the range of questions, complexes, associations, problems and feelings it will have to cover; and the better it succeeds in compressing this universality into a minimum space, the higher it will stand. — Arnold Schoenberg

 

 

The fact is that photographers arrive for a shooting session with some preconception, often of a clichéd sort, of what kind of person their subject is, and strive to substantiate that cliché in the photographs they take or, following the idiom of other languages, the photographs they make. Not only do they pose their subject as the cliché dictates, but when they return to their studio they select from among their shots those that come closest to the cliché. Thus we arrive at a paradox: the more time the photographer has to do justice to his subject, the less likely it is that justice will be done. — J. M. Coetzee

 

 

Writing music is always the struggle in the tension between fear and desire. Sometimes it's beautiful to write without fear, but it can lead to self indulgence. So fear is actually good. There's incredible fear, but also incredible desire. — Osvaldo Golijov

 

 

Being dragged from the world of painting back into the world of life was as difficult as forcing herself from the world of life back into the world of painting. A thick but permeable membrane separated them. Going from one to another required a shape-shifting in the brain. She was never entirely safely ensconced in either world; the demands of the other one could be heard, muffled from whichever one you were in, so no matter where you were, you felt a tug of anxiety that something might go wrong in the other one in your absence, something you'd failed to account for before you left. It would have been much easier if the transition could have been accomplished through a series of soundproof air locks, decompression chambers. — Kate Christensen, The Great Man

 

 

You can't put together a committee of really talented art students and get Matisse's "La Danse." You can't pool the talents of a dozen Salieris and get Mozart's Requiem. — Malcolm Gladwell

 

 

Moving art in any age is that which wins new experience. — Clement Greenberg

 

 

There is no piece of music that could relate to anything but itself and its world. It is truly an independent. The one thing coplanar with music is the compositional aspect, the fact that you are composing something. Architecture is essentially a score, and what happens with it depends on the people who play it, enjoy it, use it, or hate it. — architect Rafael Viñoly

 

 

. . . it hadn't occurred to me that the avant-garde and the comic could cohabitate. They didn't teach you that in music school. They taught you retrograde inversions, pitch classes, parameters, Klangfarbenmelodie, i.e., the gamut of formal/intellectual shibboleths that were supposed to explain contemporary music. — Jan Swafford on György Ligeti

 

 

Modernism has an uncanny ability to break things down and isolate ingredients. Matisse with color, Picasso with form and line—the best modern art is radically fundamental before it is ever fundamentally radical, a distilled purification of art’s first principles. —Ames Panero, The Critical Moment: Abstract Expressionism’s Dueling Duo. Humanities, July/August 2008

 

 

What if a baby heard only atonal music during the formative stage of his development? Would atonality then seem like the norm and tonality like the departure? Would the child grow up finally able to realize Schoenberg's dream of having his music treated as no more exotic or challenging than that of Tchaikovsky? Would this young native speaker of atonality be inclined, as Schoenberg hoped, to casually whistle 12-tone music as he walked down the street? —Jeremy Eichler, Can't get it out of my head: A father's yearlong quest to grasp the infant musical mind.

 

 

We in American music owe a great debt to John McCain and Sarah Palin. Those two have so cheapened and tainted the word "maverick" that it will be at least a generation, maybe two, before anyone will be able to use the word non-ironically again. And that means, surely, that there will be no more talk about the "American maverick composers." — Kyle Gann