Ned Rorem Quotes

Don't be too dismissive of children. While it's true that few children are artists, all artists are children.

Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.

It's not evil that's ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.

Nothing is a waste that makes a memory.

Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.

Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future.

Divine fires do not blaze each day but an artist functions in their afterglow, hoping for their recurrence.

The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty.

If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist.

composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.

Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.

Quarrels in France strengthen a love affair, in America they end it.

So far as musical pedagogy is concerned - And by extension of musical creation - Nadia Boulanger is the most influential person who ever lived

Intelligence is silence, truth is being invisible. But what a racket I make in declaring this.

In music the present is extended.

If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.

To start writing about your life is, from one standpoint, to stop living it. You must avoid adventures today so as to make time for registering those of yesterday.

Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet.

To see itself through, music must have idea or magic. ... Music with neither dies young though rich.

All men are forced into one of two categories: those with eleven fingers and those without.

The Great don't innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, they leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they've manured. A deceptive memory may be the key to their originality.

Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.

Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of