Quotes from John Williams

When I'm finished with a film, I've been living with it, we've been dubbing it, recording to it, and so on. You walk out of the studio and, 'Ah, it's finished.'

I am so lucky to be working in a field that you never grow tired of.

To continue to work, to continue to love what you do, is certainly a contributing element to one's longevity and health.

You never write a theme for a movie thinking, 'This will live forever.'

As a youngster, I never dreamed there could be a career actually earning a living writing music.

I was never that into the movies. Never. Even as a youngster. I became interested in movie music only because of the studio orchestras in Hollywood.

Composing music is hard work.

I feel very lucky, and the work that I do doesn't depend on much. If your vision's still good, and your hands - I have no arthritis in my hands, and I play the piano very easily - I don't think there's any reason to deprive oneself of the fun of working. Music is so rewarding.

Working in Hollywood for the orchestra world is a very time consuming and laborious job.

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

To read without joy is stupid.

A war doesn't merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that's left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.

He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.

One does not deceive oneself about the consequences of one's acts; one deceives oneself about the ease with which one can live with those consequences.

Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.

In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as if it were an exotic incense.

He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.

While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.

For a few moments in the evening, then, they talked quietly and casually, as if they were old friends or exhausted enemies.

it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind.