Quotes About Composition

Playing with words is like combining different notes in music.

I try to write something that has a common ground to everyone. But there's been nothing new in music since Bach; he put every note in the world on a piece of paper.

I wouldn't sit down and work at writing a song like a novelist or something.

There's kind of a cool feel that happens every now and then. I guess that feel is the thing that makes the score its own score. But, I don't know exactly what that is. So, it's hard for me to answer that question.

I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I'm always adding layers. I'll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting... It can be sometimes that delineated.

The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.

El lente es una poderosa prolongación del ojo y, sin embargo, lo que nos muestra la fotografía, una vez revelada la película, es algo que no vio el ojo o que no pudo retener la memoria. Imaginar, componer y crear son verbos colindantes. Por la composición, la fotografía es un arte.

what is important or a painter is not a thing's reality but it's shape, and what is important for a novelist is not the course of events but their ordering, and what is important for a memorist is not the factual accuracy of the account, but it's symmetry.

Like a genuine master miniaturist at the moment of greatest inspiration, holding his reed under the direct guidance of Allah, yet still able to take into consideration the form and composition of the entire page, Black continued to direct our place in the world from a corner of his mind even through his highest excitement

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water, and nobody knows what it is." —D. H. Lawrence, Pansies

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity.

function of art? What is its value? Is it about form and composition? Uniqueness of vision? The relationship between the painter and the painting? The painting and the viewer?

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

If you wish to make an imaginary animal invented by you appear natural, let us say a dragon, take for the head that of a mastiff or hound, for the eyes a cat, and for the ears a porcupine, and for the nose a greyhound, and the brows of a lion, the temple of an old cock, the neck of a terrapin.

If you stand far enough away from a picture, even a large one, the problem of the edges being at a different distance from you diminishes. Leonardo determined that a proper vantage point for a large picture should be ten to twenty times its width or height. "Stand back until your eye is at least twenty times as far off as the greatest height and width of your work

Learning to read and write disables the oral poet, Lord found: it introduces into his mind the concept of a text as controlling the narrative and thereby interferes with the oral composing processes, which have nothing to do with texts but are 'the remembrance of songs sung

I became aware of recorded piano music. The composition had no style to it. It wasn't jazz or classical or even elevator covers of pop tunes—just notes strung together in tight mathematical patterns with no heart.

painting is more than the sum of its parts," he would tell me, and then go on to explain how the cow by itself is just a cow, and the meadow by itself is just grass and flowers, and the sun peeking through the trees is just a beam of light, but put them all together and you've got magic. I

She had students read their compositions aloud so that everyone could hear how good writing had three Cs: clarity, coherence, and cadence.

He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.

The written English we want is clean, clear prose. I choose my words carefully – not elegant, not stylish, just clean, clear prose. It means simplifying, polishing and tightening.

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.