Ned Rorem (born October 23, 1923) is an American composer and diarist. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976.
If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.
Love is a mystery which, when solved, evaporates. The same holds for music.
composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.
Art means to dare - and to have been right.
Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes. Frigidaires are perfect. Beauty limps. My frigidaire has had to be replaced.
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.
Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.
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.
Anyone can be gay - it's no accomplishment - but only I can be me.
The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.
Compose first, worry later.
There are no fascinating people, only their works are fascinating.
Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes.
Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.
Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet.
All men are forced into one of two categories: those with eleven fingers and those without.
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.
So far as musical pedagogy is concerned - And by extension of musical creation - Nadia Boulanger is the most influential person who ever lived
The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of
Minor artists borrow, great ones steal.