Our experience is composed rather of illusions that of wisdom acquired.

When written in Chinese the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

The first year I started in San Francisco there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.

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.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989 my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

Our strength is often composed of the weakness that we're damned if we're going to show.

Society is composed of two great classes those who have more dinners than appetite and those who have more appetite than dinners.

I think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics Brahms so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

Since the composer has said everything if you discover everything it will be enough and you will be a happy man. Don't try to say it's your taste and because of that you are changing this or that. And I must say this respect is still there.

I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish it is his idea I am embellishing.

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.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

The snow itself is lonely or if you prefer self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.

My husband is a composer so he plays piano all the time and I sit there and clap telling my unborn child 'Hear me clap hear the music.' I know music in general is supposed to be good for babies to hear.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself in a sense in the mid 1960s really when I first heard composers like Terry Riley and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

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.

Life is like music it must be composed by ear feeling and instinct not by rule.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.

There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order only a conviction accepted by our knowledge and judgment that it is so.

It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.