John Williams Quotes & Sayings

They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been. — John Williams

I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions. — John Williams

A chap can't pick the way he'll die, or we'd all do better at it. — John Williams

I find that musically, looking back, I have learned much more from those relationships, people I have bumped into that I have admired, that's the way I feel musically I have learned most in life. — John Williams

I was never that into the movies. Never. Even as a youngster. I became interested in movie music only because of the studio orchestras in Hollywood. — John Williams

I, over the years, have always felt more comfortable if I could go into a projection room and look at a film and not really know what to expect. If you read the script first, you form all kinds of preconceptions about how things look, what the location's like, what the actors are like. — John Williams

So the bed that had been the arena of their passion became the support of her illness. — John Williams

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted. — John Williams

For me, there is a strong family connection to Boston and anything connected to Boston, which includes Fenway. — John Williams

Through it all he continued to teach and study, though he sometimes felt that he hunched his back futilely against the driving storm and cupped his hands uselessly around the dim flicker of his last poor match. — John Williams

My God, to read without joy is stupid. — John Williams

The party was like many another. Conversation began desultorily, gathered a swift but feeble energy, and trailed irrelevantly into other conversations; laughter was quick and nervous, and it burst like tiny explosives in a continuous but unrelated barrage all over the room; and the members of the party flowed casually from one place to another, as if quietly occupying shifting positions of strategy. — John Williams

Middle age, my boy. No memory at all. — John Williams

There's a very basic human, non-verbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression. It doesn't have to do with body movements, it doesn't have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual. — John Williams

I always wrote music for my friends, but my focus was on playing piano. I didn't think I'd be quite good enough to be a soloist, but I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could work as a player, a teacher. — John Williams

There are occasionally eureka moments - off the top of my head, maybe Darth Vader's theme, you know, the imperial march. — John Williams

...everything you say is a fact, but none of it is true — John Williams

When you think about Boston, Harvard and M.I.T. are the brains of the city, and its soul might be Faneuil Hall or the State House or the Old Church. But I think the pulsing, pounding heart of Boston is Fenway Park. — John Williams

But before [William Stoner] the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that awaited his exploration. He saw it as the great University library, to which new wings might be built, to which new books might be added and from which old ones might be withdrawn, while its true nature remained essentially unchanged. — John Williams

Horace once told me that laws were powerless against the private passions of the human heart, and only he who has no power over it, such as the poet or the philosopher, may persuade the human spirit to virtue. — John Williams

There is no proof that carbon dioxide is causing or precedes global warming ... All indications are that the minor warming cycle finished in 2001 and that Arctic ice melting is related to cyclical orbit-tilt-axis changes in earth's angle to the sun. — John Williams

Working in Hollywood for the orchestra world is a very time consuming and laborious job. — John Williams

I have come to believe in the life of every man, late or soon, there is a moment when he knows beyond whatever else he might understand, and whether he can articulate the knowledge or not, the terrifying fact that he is alone, and separate, and that he can be no other than the poor thing that is himself. — John Williams

So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it's gratifying to have something you have done linger in people's memories. — John Williams

a quotation from the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as an epigraph for Stoner: "A hero is one who wants to be himself." In — John Williams

To read without joy is stupid. — John Williams

A man may live like a fool for a year, and become wise in a day. — John Williams

What did you expect? — John Williams

...and he wondered if he appeared as ludicrous to others as he did to himself. — John Williams

Later, William Stoner could not remember how he learned these things, that first afternoon and early evening at Josiah Claremont's house; for the time of his meeting was blurred and formal, like the figured tapestry on the stair wall off the foyer. — John Williams

Composing music is hard work. — John Williams

He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter. — John Williams

but his long thin fingers moved with grace and persuasion, as if giving to the words a shape that his voice could not. — John Williams

You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you - that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. — John Williams

The coroner announced heart failure as the cause of death, but William Stoner always felt that in a moment of anger and despair Sloane had willed his heart to cease, as if in a last mute gesture of love and contempt for a world that had betrayed him so profoundly that he could not endure in it. — John Williams

Rome is not eternal; it does not matter. Rome will fall; it does not matter. The barbarian will conquer; it does not matter. There was a moment of Rome, and it will not wholly die; the barbarian will become the Rome he conquers; the language will smooth his rough tongue; the vision of what he destroys will flow in his blood. And in time that is ceaseless as this salt sea upon which I am so frailly suspended, the cost is nothing, is less than nothing. — John Williams

I think of myself as a film composer. — John Williams

The possibility has occurred to me that the proper condition of man, which is to say that condition in which he is most admirable, may not be that prosperity, peace, and harmony which I labored to give to Rome." He has founded his empire, in other words, on a misconception. This — John Williams

The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us. — John Williams

She was an only child, and loneliness was one of the earliest conditions of her life. — John Williams

He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something - even pain - to pierce him, to bring him alive. He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. — John Williams

As he got to know her better, he learned more of her childhood; and he came to realize that it was typical of that of most girls of her time and circumstance. She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation. She — John Williams

And we have come out of this, at least, with ourselves. We know that we are - what we are. — John Williams

Begone, begone, you bloody whoreson Gauls! — John Williams

There was a perception that the emerging-market problems aren't over and concern that may Brazil devalue. — John Williams

He was silent for a long time as he looked from face to face. He heard his voice issue flatly. "I have taught ... " he said. He began again. "I have taught at this University for nearly forty years. I do not know what I would have done if I had not been a teacher. If I had not taught, I might have-" He paused, as if distracted. Then he said, with a finality, "I want to thank you all for letting me teach. — John Williams

she had never been alone to care for her own self one day of her life, nor could it ever have occurred to her that she might become responsible for the well- being of another. — John Williams

But don't you know, Mr. Stoner?" Sloane asked. "Don't you understand about yourself yet? You're going to be a teacher."
Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, "Are you sure?"
"I'm sure," Sloane said softly.
"How can you tell? How can you be sure?"
"It's love, Mr. Stoner," Sloane said cheerfully. "You are in love. It's as simple as that. — John Williams

He continued, "I just want to say that your paper was the best discussion I know of the subject, and I'm grateful that you volunteered to give it. — John Williams

We need not forgive ourselves," he (Augustus) said. "It has been a marriage. It has been better than most. — John Williams

You may need to refresh — John Williams

So I must be locked up, where I can be safely irresponsible, where I can do no harm. — John Williams

Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you - that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old. — John Williams

Saying, ain't doing. — John Williams

He was gripped by what he could think of only as numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. — John Williams

Some kids, for some reason, it just doesn't click in the classroom as they need it to. We have college coaches talk to them, former high school athletes, motivational speakers, teachers, principals. — John Williams

As a youngster, I never dreamed there could be a career actually earning a living writing music. — John Williams

I'm happy to be busy. I'm happy to have a wonderful family. — John Williams

He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire... — John Williams

He felt both shame and pride, and over it all a bitter disappointment, in himself and in the time and circumstance that made him possible. — John Williams

As a young pianist in Hollywood, I began orchestrating for others, and I just felt really comfortable doing that. — John Williams

He is a man like any other ... he will become what he will become, out of the force of his person and the accident of his fate. — John Williams

You mustn't give it up," he said, and his voice took on an urgency that he could not understand. "No matter how hard it will seem sometimes, you mustn't give it up. It's too good for you to give it up. Oh, it's good, there's no doubt of it. — John Williams