There are people who must spend huge amounts of time composing these online diatribes against me, all about how disgusting and terrible I am and how no one should ever read my books, and it's not enough for them to hate me, they can't stand the fact ...
A whole generation of veteran composers has never taken a stand or provided an example and has produced in the music academies generations of docile workers for the music industry. What can you expect from downtrodden workers who see music as a type ...
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: [about the royal composer's position he did not get] Whom did they choose? Antonio Salieri: Herr Zummer. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Herr Zummer? But the man's a fool, he's a total mediocrity! Antonio Salieri: No, no, he has yet...
Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.
If nature has composed the human body so that in its proportions the seperate individual elements answer to the total form, then the Ancients seem to have had reason to decide that bringing their creations to full completion likewise required a corre...
They say that even of a good thing you can have too much. But I doubt it. True, such good things as sunbathing, beer, and tobacco may be intemperately pursued to the detriment of their devotees; yet, to my mind, one cannot have too much of a good mur...
When you call someone a sinner, make sure you have no sin in you, and if you say you are without sin, you are a righteous liar.
God gives urge, urge gives pleasure, pleasure gives pains, pains gives fruits, fruits gives trees, trees die and go to hell!
We love the night and its quiet; and there is no night that we love so well as that on which the moon is coffined in clouds.
Tea tempers the spirits and harmonizes the mind, dispels lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness, lightens or refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties.
Edward Gibbon, in his classic work on the fall of the Roman Empire, describes the Roman era's declension as a place where "bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.
The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of Job, who becomes human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan.
To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.
New hair, new clothes-the classic relationship break-up makeover," Jake said. Delaney stared at him for a beat. In a way, he was right. She breaking up with Sam. He just didn't know it.
I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers...
Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.
Magne Furuholmen is a very dear friend of mine. A-ha are a classic pop band and they've got some brilliant songs. I'd say 'The Living Daylights' was one of my favourite Bond tunes: regardless of it being a Bond song, it stands alone as a great piece ...
Here's the irony in what I do: When I go out to eat, I like classic French food. I like amazing Japanese food that has such a history that it goes back hundreds of years. And I also like really innovative food as well.
Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the '60s and '70s, I knew bass guitar was m...
By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design ...
I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello.
