Composing A Life Quotes & Sayings

How many exes do you have? You're like a fame-whore, female pop star gone wild after she left her sock puppets show for more mature gig. — Rea Lidde

I knew I was going to be composing. It all makes sense in retrospect. But you don't know while you're in the process of improvising your life. — William Bolcom

I've been composing music all my life and if I'd been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college. — Anthony Hopkins

A 527 doesn't have a wife. It doesn't have a brother-in-law who knows a lot about politics, or a union president who calls and doesn't like the color of the suit, or bimbo eruptions. It's the perfect candidate, because it has no personal characteristics. — Roger Stone

If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment. — James Dyson

Just because one person's problem is less traumatic than another's doesn't mean they're required to hurt less — J.A. Redmerski

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God. — Igor Stravinsky

When I read something, I picture that scene in that detail. That becomes very similar to composing a photo in real life. — Sally Mann

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practise which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs. — Muriel Spark

The question whether the long effort to put an end to war can succeed without another major convulsion challenges not only our minds but our sense of responsibility. — Emily Greene Balch

All these people who say they want a life free from sexual compulsion, I mean forget it. I mean, what could ever be better than sex?
For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose ... watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh.
I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut-hosing orgasm.
Painting a picture, composing an opera, that's just something you do until you find the next willing piece of ass. — Chuck Palahniuk

What artist has not experienced the feverish euphoria of composing the perfect thumbnail sketch, first draft, negative or melody - only to run headlong into a stone wall trying to convert that tantalizing hint into the finished mural, novel, photograph, sonata. The artist's life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast. — David Bayles

Playing is much, much harder than composing in my opinion, becoming a player. If you want to be a player for all your life either you decide not to do it professionally and just enjoy it and just do it every weekend, but if you want to be a professional musician- hardest thing I could imagine and I really wasn't capable of doing it. — John Powell

I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key
as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away. — Saul Bellow

But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology. He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine. He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul. — E. M. Forster

Unexpected discorporation was always rare on Mars; Martian taste in such matters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death taking place at the appropriate and selected instant. This artist, however, had become so preoccupied with his work that he had forgotten to come in out of the cold; by the time his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He himself had not noticed his own discorporation and had gone right on composing his sequence. — Robert A. Heinlein

Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die. — Irvin D. Yalom

I don't hate work, composing is not work for me, it's my pleasure; it's my life. So why should I stop? If something is pleasurable and exciting and rewarding, why should one stop? — Gunther Schuller

My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I'll bury her under a decent layer of white paint. But I haven't done with the old lady; far from it! — Emily Carr

The first time I had money, I was extravagant, but then you realise it's not just about that. If I lost it all tomorrow, it wouldn't be me that's hurt, it would be my babies. It would be more about people's opinion of me that would concern me. — Rebecca Ferguson

when it comes to the caprices and manipulations of the gods or God, whichever philosophy you may embrace, we are all of us merely pawns in their games, rather than players. — Peter David

Sometimes the fresh load of guests would turn up before we had got rid of the previous group, and the chaos was indescribable; the house and garden would be dotted with poets, authors, artists, and playwrights arguing, painting, drinking, typing, and composing. Far from being the ordinary, charming people that Larry had promised, they all turned out to be the most extraordinary eccentrics who were so highbrow that they had difficulty in understanding one another. — Gerald Durrell

In England, life is a long process of composing oneself ... — Shirley Hazzard

Damn it, I'm angry now. I do believe life is loss, I do, but my suffering-to-words-ratio was out of control: lying around composing nothing but these - righteous arias, month after month, these tawdry special pleas. — Gwendoline Riley

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first. — Blaise Pascal

Silken strings composing the harpsichord of life accommodate a score of emotional tidings. An orchestra of linked heartbeats strumming the melodious prose of our collective intones gives rise to sonnets of melancholy, producing an illimitable libretto stretching from the milky dawn of newborn's amaranth life to the speckled sunsets of gentle souls whom we cherish. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Starting a new chapter is much like composing the perfect photograph. You must ensure the proper components are there. You may throw out the extra, but with out the key elements the story goes untold. — Faith Tilley Johnson

Whatever may be my activity in a given moment (whether I am composing, or whether I am making love . . .), I feel pleasure if there is an obstacle placed in my path but one not greater than my ability to overcome. If circumstances paralyze my energy, I suffer. From this point of view, pleasure and pain accompany every moment of our life, even if we try to disregard them. — Alexander Scriabin

'Faith and Will' sprang from my personal experience with passing through a dark spiritual time. — Julia Cameron

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be. — Christopher Hitchens

Rainer Maria Rilke sacrificed everything
For his art he dedicated himself
To the Great Work

I admired his single-mindedness
All through my twenties
I argued his case

Now I think he was a jerk
For skipping his daughter's wedding
For fear of losing his focus

He believed in the ancient enmity
Between daily life and the highest work
Or Ruth and the Duino Elegies

It is probably a middle-class prejudice
Of mine to think that Anna Akhmatova
Should have raised her son Lev

Instead of dumping him on her husband's mom
Motherhood is a bright torture she confessed
I was not worthy of it

Lev never considered it sufficient
For her to stand outside his prison
Month after month clutching packages

And composing Requiem for the masses — Edward Hirsch

I have kind of an intuitive feeling as a composer as to what would be appropriate for those groups and how to feature certain paths in a certain way, whether there was dialogue in a scene, or whether there was no dialogue and music was telling the story at that point. — Howard Shore

Immigration today is a racial issue. It is one which sees masses of non-whites from around the globe immigrating to white countries. — Arthur Kemp

Don't separate 'real' life from 'creative' life. — Patti Digh

The process of composing the film score for each movie is completely different. They all have their own personality and their own completely different life, but there's never been a formula. Each time, it's a new thing. — Trevor Rabin

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. — Christopher Hitchens

There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act. — Tom Robbins

The truth isn't just what you see with your eyes. Not just what you see ... — Kaori Yuki

Composing is my life blood. — Morton Gould