NED ROREM

Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.

Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.

Art means to dare - and to have been right.

Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.

Divine fires do not blaze each day, but an artist functions in their afterglow hoping for their recurrence.

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of.

If you read reviews of concerts, the word 'creative' comes up all the time. However, performers playing music usually aren't creative. Critics might say they are, but they're just playing another persons work. They didn't create it.

Intelligence is silence, truth is being invisible. But what a racket I make in declaring this.

The Great don't innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, they leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they've manured. A deceptive memory may be the key to their originality.

Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future.

Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes.

As a lifelong pacifist, Quaker, and a gay man, I despair that gays and lesbians are expending energy trying to get into the military when they should be using that same energy getting rid of the military completely.

There are no fascinating people, only their works are fascinating.

The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience.

All men are forced into one of two categories: those with eleven fingers and those without.

Sooner or later you've heard all your best friends have to say. Then comes the tolerance of real love.

Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.

In music the present is extended.

Don't be too dismissive of children. While it's true that few children are artists, all artists are children.

Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes. Frigidaires are perfect. Beauty limps. My frigidaire has had to be replaced.

Anyone can be gay - it's no accomplishment - but only I can be me.

Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet.

If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist.