Composer Quotes

Now I have finished with all earthly business, and high time too. Yes, yes, my dear child, now comes death.

So I write melodies - thirty, forty, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide.

My father had left behind an old piano. My sister was already going to school, my mother was out working, and I stayed at home alone with my adorable grandmother who understood nothing I said. It was so boring that I stayed at the piano all day long, and that saved my life.

I would listen to something on the radio and try to tap out the melody, then the harmonies.

I have a very strange melodic gift: melodies come to me effortlessly.

Here is how I work: when I think that a film needs to have a principal theme, I search for a melody.

You don't have to want to, you just have to do it.

The opposite of war is not peace, it's creation.

In these dangerous times, where it seems the world is ripping apart at the seams, we can all learn how to survive from those who stare death squarely in the face every day, and we should reach out to each other and bond as a community, rather than hide from the terrors of life at the end of the mill

Forget regret, or life is yours to miss.

When I got finished, Gershwin paid me the ultimate compliment. He said, 'Boy, even I couldn't do that.'

When you're up against an electric band like that, it's like you're on two separate planets.

We really never know what we're gonna play when we get on stage.

Once we're inside a tune, we can do anything with it.

Musicians are always gigging and never have a chance to stop for a minute.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

I'm not talking ideas, or even presentation. It's like in politics: You have to sell something to become an electric player - like your skin or your heart.

I don't like recording studios - except my own, which is just a little room above the garage.

I cannot say what I think is right about music. I only know the rightness of it.

With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them.

When I was 15, I did not know nothing about what concerned the world of music.

The idea in The Man that Would Be King was that the music should recreate all that majestic surrounding and emphasize the adventure, but also speak about the frustration or, rather said, the curse of both protagonists, even before happened what happens them.

Soon I worked during twelve years in theater works of the prestigious Theatre National Populaire. It was the best time of my life, the most difficult, the most interesting, the most exciting.

Some months ago, while I was preparing a new work, I told a young cinema executive my intention of including in a soundtrack two themes from Bach. But when he asked me which has been the last hit from that Bach?, then I knew that I had no longer place in cinema.

Nowadays, if a studio assumes that his film is bad, there is always an executive that gets more nervous than usual and thinks that if they change the music, the film will become a masterpiece.

My parents did not have any interest in music.

In that long sequence, when Lawrence enters in the desert to rescue a lost man, Lean listened the music I wrote and wanted to extend the scene to let my work stay completely.

I began to write a kind of waltz and in a little more than an hour I had the theme written.

For Ryan's Daughter I used a total of eight harps, something that was, at least, weird.