Quotes About Composition

One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects.

I enjoy doing layoutproblems of design. I could very cheerfully be a typographer.

When you improvise, do you think of the chord changes or the melody? Both. This is an interesting question which Im unable to answer adequately. If the melody is the skeleton of the particular object, then the chord changes are its wardrobe, its changes of clothes. I tend to pay rather more attention to the latter than to the former. All I want is just a trace of skeletonthree bones from which the rest may be reasoned out.

Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.

She is oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus.

Violet es oxígeno, carbono, hidrógeno, nitrógeno, calcio y fósforo. Los seis elementos de los que todos estamos compuestos, aunque no puedo evitar pensar que es algo más que eso, que posee otros elementos de los que nadie ha oído hablar y que la diferencian de todos los demás.

In the bottom of the desk drawer I found an old composition notebook from my Harriet the Spy days. It was colored in pink and green and yellow highlighter. I'd followed the boys around for days, taking notes in it until I drove Steven crazy and he told Mom on me.

For all its interconnectedness, music is marked by a unique and irreducible integrity, its own way of working.

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it. –

The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.

The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: Sometimes, placing one work of art near another makes one plus one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both, and create a third thing.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration

Music, the mosaic of the air

It's all in how you arrange the thing... the careful balance of the design is the motion.

The formation of a unified standard (biblical) text probably also involved the elimination of terms and structures that were too archaic to be understood so many centuries after the material had first been composed.

He says there are three kinds of people in any society, because people are tripartite. What does that mean?" "Comprised of three parts. Plato believes humans are appetite, spirit, and reason. But I am not certain HaShem would agree. The Torah tells us that man is body and soul.

when you gain an understanding of the structure that lies beneath stories. When you understand the bone structure of a plot skeleton, you'll know how to build a story.

I'm aware there are certain products that are being advertised - food products - with 'no chemicals whatsoever.' Well, that would be pretty hard to arrange, since everything around us is made up of atoms and molecules - chemicals - including ourselves.

When someone asks me to do a score, I look at the picture two or three times. I never watch the rushes to pick up the mood as quickly as I can. If it's something I want to do, just watching the film will start the wheels turning.

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.

Ragtime has about the same amount of respect as comics. And in a way they're similar art forms. Ragtime is highly compositional, and the emotion in the music is built in, whereas in jazz a lot of that emotion comes from the way it's performed.

I'll just start laying out the melody exactly where I want it to fall. And then I'll go back and fill it out. Whereas, in other pieces I'm really just going a couple bars at a time.