Ned Rorem Quotes - Page 2

Sooner or later you've heard all your best friends have to say. Then comes the tolerance of real love.

Anyone can be gay - it's no accomplishment - but only I can be me.

Compose first, worry later.

Art means to dare - and to have been right.

The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience.

Minor artists borrow, great ones steal.

An artist doesn't necessarily have deeper feelings than other people, but he can express these feelings. He is like everyone else-only more so! He speaks with a Formal Sigh.

There are no fascinating people, only their works are fascinating.

Greatness is not the effect of which inspiration is the cause. We are all inspired, but we are all not great.

Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out, while Romantic grows from outside in.

If you read reviews of concerts, the word 'creative' comes up all the time. However, performers playing music usually aren't creative. Critics might say they are, but they're just playing another persons work. They didn't create it.

Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes.

If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest . . . she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists. Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death.

Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes. Frigidaires are perfect. Beauty limps. My frigidaire has had to be replaced.

As a lifelong pacifist, Quaker, and a gay man, I despair that gays and lesbians are expending energy trying to get into the military when they should be using that same energy getting rid of the military completely.

I don't go to concerts much. I've heard everything. When I do go to movies, I walk out half the time. As for literature, I've read everything.

Why, after all, must everyone like music? That they are missing something is just the lover's opinion.

Love is a mystery which, when solved, evaporates. The same holds for music.