Lukas Foss Quotes

To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius.

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.

Mozart had a tremendously fertile and creative ear for a catchy tune.

Amadeus Mozart is to music something like Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was to literature. They are people who created something that nobody before them had. Absolute geniuses. You can recognize their harmonies among thousands.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge.

Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift.

The guy that I worked on 'Thriller ' was a genius and he was 20 years old, but it was like working with a gifted 10-year-old. The guy who I worked on with 'Black Or White' was crazy. Michael had gone mad.

In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can.

When you're a kid, Beethoven is Beethoven, but as I've grown older, my astonishment at the sheer inventiveness of the man has increased, and I have an appreciation that I didn't have when I was in my 20s.

I think there are very few people that I would give the title of genius to, really, but Beethoven unquestionably is one of them.

There has never been any great genius without a spice of madness.

Inspiration and genius -one and the same.

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

There's a fine line between what would characterize you as a troglodyte and what would characterize you as a brilliant, avant-garde, forward-thinking genius. There's some middle ground.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Mozart was very much an arrested adolescent.

Of course creativity is a mystery. We don't know what drives it or what constitutes it. It's one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it's impossible to define.

Genius is a word too often tossed around in musical circles.

Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

Steve McQueen is a genius. And I think that word is overused, but I think with Steve it's rightly used. He's a genius.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

What Einstein was able to do was - to use a cliche - think out of the box.

If they had Mozart today, they couldn't work with him, although he was a very adaptable man.

Upper berth, lower berth, that's the difference between talent and genius.