Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.
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.
Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
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?
Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer's life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer's works.
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.