Virgil Thomson Quotes
I've never known a musician who regretted being one. Music itself is not going to let you down.
Quotes to Explore
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Even if you can't relate to what I'm singing, I hope you can believe in it and see it as something that it is real.
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My whole reason for creating a network is literally to bring little pieces of light. It's to continue to spread little pieces of light in the world, to illuminate the possibility of the human spirit.
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I loved theatre and did magic, too, but I was never the best at it - there was never a teacher saying, 'You're great, you have to make this your career!' I was good at science and math. I figured I'd go into science and become a dentist.
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I think I've been influenced by everything I've ever heard. The first thing I ever heard was my grandma, who was an opera singer. The first song I ever learned was the 'Nessun Dorma' from Puccini's 'Turandot.' My father was a big band singer, so I used to hear him walking around the house singing standards all the time.
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If GE's strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.
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The movie business is a big gamble.
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Every time you pass a law, it is a little bite out of freedom.
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We lived in a classless society. We'd spend a summer at Gore Vidal's house in Italy, but we were on and off welfare.
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Libraries are at a cultural crossroads. Some proffer that libraries as we know them may go away altogether, ironic victims of the information age where Google has subverted Dewey decimal and researchers can access anything on a handheld device. Who needs to venture deep into the stacks when answers are but a click away?
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The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.
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Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas.
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From where many of us in the U.K. sit, American politics is hopelessly polarized. All kinds of issues get bundled up into two great heaps. The rest of the world, today and across the centuries, simply doesn't see things in this horribly oversimplified way.
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I don't just whisper it, I say it and I say it: 'The United Nations is an anti-Semitic organization, an anti-Israel organization.'
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I never think about what others are doing. I do a film for myself, not others.
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Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
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Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.
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Whether you like me, or hate me, this is me.
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And there are Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare in wit-combat, sure enough; Ben bearing down like a mighty Spanish war-ship, fraught with all learning and artillery; Shakespeare whisking away from him - whisking right through him, athwart the big bulk and timbers of him; like a miraculous Celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams!
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Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.
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Songwriting ability is a gift. After a while, you come to realize, "I've really been blessed. I can write these things and it makes me happy, and it makes millions of people happy." It's an obligation, it's bigger than you. It's the only true magic I know. It's not pulling a rabbit out of a hat; it's real. It's your soul floating out to theirs.
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They have begun to realize that when you focus only on the U.S. it gives the impression that the U.S. doesn't care about Iraqis. In these kinds of political battles you need to count your allies, not just yourself.
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I've never known a musician who regretted being one. Music itself is not going to let you down.
