“It is not hard to compose, but it is wonderfully hard to let the superfluous notes fall under the table.”— Johannes Brahms
“My main desire has always been to compose music, to be a composer. The synthesizer was a tool to do that.”— Wendy Carlos
“The main thing is to get a theme, a theme that is not too obvious, that can be used in a number of different ways.”— Alfred Newman
“Listening to the seemingly endless flow of music, it is easy to forget that composing is a crisis-ridden activity.”— Aaron Copland
“For me, the desirability of composing is directly related to the desirability of not composing.”— Fred Frith
“Film scoring is a completely different muscle. It's like being a painter, but you're painting on a canvas that's already moving.”— Stewart Copeland
“You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of summary of your life experience.”— Aaron Copland
“Orchestration is a huge part of composition. It’s not just about the notes; it’s about what instrument plays those notes.”— Anne Dudley