The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.
Ansel Adams

The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.
Benjamin Britten

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.
Charles Kettering

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.
Igor Stravinsky

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.
Harrison Birtwistle

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.
Arthur Honegger

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.
Gustav Mahler

To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked.
Dirk Benedict

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.
Leo Ornstein

Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours.
Gioachino Rossini

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.
Cecilia Bartoli

Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist.
John Eaton

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.
Gordon Getty

Which is why, in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius' way of thinking, and could follow him.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?
Franz Schubert

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.
Maurice Jarre

Yes, Carl Vine stuck around. He's now number one composer for choreography.
Graeme Murphy

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.
John Corigliano

You have to face the fact that I have no reputation as a composer; I have my reputation as a songwriter and a performer-and that opportunity came this summer, when I was invited to perform at the Lincoln Centre festival in New York... three nights.
Elvis Costello