Quotes About Composition

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after.

closing movement of the Cello Sonata in D, Op.

It was largely my interest in art that had destroyed any life in the world around me. I'd learned perspective, and about balance, and composition. It was as if I'd learned to redesign everything, to reshape it so I saw what OUGHT to be there, which of course is much inferior to what IS there. The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education.

Great songs write themselves. You're just being led by the nose, or the ears. The skill is not to interfere with it too much. Ignore intelligence, ignore everything; just follow it where it takes you.

In the real world, writing is not artificially separated into specific discourses. It is blended for effect.

Literature is the queen of the arts —the greatest of them all, because it embraces them all. When you write, you are making music, painting, drawing, cinema...

Magic's the fifth element, along with earth, air, fire, and water, from which everything is composed.

You can make anything by writing.

All the corpses in the world are chemically identical, but living individuals are not.

With the help of modern technology, I can compose intricate keyboard parts and then I have to go back and learn them in order to perform them properly.

He koude songes make and wel endyte.

Occasionally, too, and quite unbidden, it would warble little impromptu inward melodies of my own composition, which often seemed to me extremely pretty, old-fashioned, and quaint; but one is not a fair judge of one's own productions, especially during the heat of inspiration; and I had not the means of recording them, as I had never learned the musical notes. What the world has lost! Now whose this small voice was I did not find out till many years later, for it was not mine!

This is the part where I should probably do that thing Arland does," Sean said quietly. "Where he announces that he isn't a poet, but a humble awkward soldier, and then composes a sonnet on the spot.

I don't know. How did Beethoven hear the Ninth Symphony in his head before he wrote it down? The brain's a pretty good computer, too, isn't it?

that little bit between each note — silences which give the form

We are now beyond nature's normal variation in terms of how the atmosphere is composed. Nature did something for a million years. It actually goes back a lot further than that, but the ice core records show a million years. So, nature has this normal oscillation within this zone, and all of a sudden, we're forty percent outside that zone.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.

I call architecture 'petrified music'.

Architecture is frozen music.

His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him that nature might stand up

Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.