Virgil Thomson Quotes
The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.
Quotes to Explore
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I wouldn't wish overnight success on anyone. You have no real friends. Everyone works endless hours at different studios, so far apart. Even on your own lot, relationships were formal and often competitive.
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'Yellow Moon' was a poem. My wife at the time, Joel - she's dead now - it was our 25th anniversary. She had the chance to go on a cruise with her sister. And I'm home with the kids and looking up, and I saw the big moon, and I just started writing.
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I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.
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Time and time again, truly basic studies of simple experimental organisms have proved directly relevant to human biology and human disease. An investment in such basic studies is an effective investment indeed.
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I don't know how old I was when I started writing books. But, I was born in 1931, and I wrote my first book in 1961.
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You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking.
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When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.
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The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.
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In Hollywood, marriages are kind of expected to fail.
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I can be collaborative, for instance, in situations where I go and study the artist's work before I start writing. Then I can at least try to write towards their style.
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San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.
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I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America. I wanted to photograph.
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When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.
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Well, as an artist, I think that Elvis's generosity to me he always talked very highly about me, he always spoke very highly about my work and singing and my writing.
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Scientology is the study of knowingness. It increases one's knowingness, but if a man were totally aware of what was going on around him, he would find it relatively simple to handle any outnesses in that.
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I hate violence, yes I do. It's kind of a dilemma, huh?.
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I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.
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My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
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The young see what they wish to see. The old see what they do not wish.
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Thankfully I'm not endlessly ambitious, but I have done some crazy ambitious things like buying an island off the west coast of Scotland in the late Sixties.
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Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
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If real, regular, normal, boring life, when you're at home every day, seeing the same people, doing the same things is like sitting at home on the floor surrounded by toys... traveling feels to me like going to Toys R Us with your toy box and getting to trade stuff in and buy new things and explore whole new ideas.
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Watching 'Dark Crystal' now, having made Muppet films, it really strikes me just how ambitious that film is in terms of the constructs, the builds, the puppeteering.
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The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.
