Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.
A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.
A person's life is over in 50, 100 years. But a company lives on through the people it is composed of, and SoftBank group has to survive even after I'm gone.
There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.
A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
Composing is sort of an intuitive act. You have to put yourself in the right frame of mind.
The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.
Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.
Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them.
I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish, it is his idea I am embellishing.
Fundamentally, American society is composed of individuals who don't go out of their way to do each other favours.
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.
I would love to compose something for dance before I kick the bucket, and I'm not closed-minded about the dance, or the dance company.
Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.
There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.
To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked.
Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
