Ned Rorem famous quotes

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

#Children #Artist

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

#Growing Up #Artist #Childhood

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

#Memories #Inspiration

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

#Artist #Fire #Each Day

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.
-- Ned Rorem

#Memories #Flower #Roots

Art means to dare - and to have been right.
-- Ned Rorem

#Art #Mean #Dare

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.
-- Ned Rorem

#Military #Gay #Men

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

#Men #Two #Eleven

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

#Art #Speak #Music Is

Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future.
-- Ned Rorem

#Art #Nostalgia #Sole

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

#Music #Speech #Needs

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

#Ideas #Magic #Rich

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

#Romantic Love #America #France

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

#Music #Love Is #Singing

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

#Thinking #Distortion #Composer

Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes.
-- Ned Rorem

#Art #Hero #Perfection

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

#Art #Lying #Knowing

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

#Real #Tolerance #Your Best Friend

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.
-- Ned Rorem

#Mean #Classic #Standards

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

#Art #Hero #Perfection

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.
-- Ned Rorem

#Rome #Perfect #Evil

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

#Music #Missing #Lovers

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

#Inspiration #Greatness #Causes

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.
-- Ned Rorem

#Adventure #Writing #Yesterday

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

#Hearing #Needs #Pieces

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

#Beautiful #Moving #World

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

#Artist #Giving #Definitions

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

#Ballet #Musical #Opera

Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.
-- Ned Rorem

#Humor #Coins #Sides

In music the present is extended.
-- Ned Rorem

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

#Art #Views #Vanity

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.
-- Ned Rorem

#Artist #People #Feelings

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

#Musical #Influential #Creation