A. R. Rahman Quotes

When I was composing for 'The Villain,' I looked at it as a fan and came up with tunes accordingly.

I really love that type of music where someone can take a guitar or light instrumentation and a beautiful voice and can send me somewhere.

When I'm writing with just an acoustic guitar, it can be for anyone.

How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.

... I like the clubs because ... we have two or three acoustic guitars up there and we're not hard-core slamming or stomping through the music. We're singing it with intricate harmonies and really showing the craftsmanship.

You can be the most artistically perfect performer in the world, but an audience is like a broad - if you're indifferent, Endsville.

Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

It is always the same with me; only when I experience something do I compose, and only when composing do I experience! After all, a musician's nature can hardly be expressed in words.

The most perfect melodic shapes are found in Mozart; he has the lightness of touch which is the true objective ... Listen to the remarkable expansion of a Mozart melody, to Cherubino's 'Voi che sapete', for instance. You think it is coming to an end, but it goes farther, even farther.

It's a weird job because making music or writing a song is a personal thing... and it kind of has to be. You can always tell when people are faking.

Music seems to hold everything together. It seems to make things not so chaotic sometimes. It seems to make things make more sense sometimes.

And you still have to sqeeze into your jeans, but you're perfect to me.

Music brings life to my soul.

I began to learn a lot of chords and rhythms. It was a bit boring at the time but came in very handy later on.

Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.

Every song has a different genesis, or feeling. Usually the lyrics, I don't really know what it's all about, I just kinda do it. I mean, there's a combination of, like you're saying, that kind of lyrics about commitment or vaguely relationship lyrics mixed with jokey 90s Beck-style non-sequiturs and stuff.

I started playing the acoustic guitar for more singer-songwriter type stuff. I bet if I would have gotten more approval for my "rock playing", I might be a world class shredder.

The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.

No matter how many great performances or exciting visuals we put together for the movie, we found that it was all somewhat two dimensional until we added the emotional heart of Howard Shore's music. Then, and only then, did the film come to life.

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect--a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.

Another way of working is setting deliberate constraints that aren't musical ones - like saying, "Well, this piece is going to be three minutes and nineteen seconds long and it's going to have changes here, here and here, and there's going to be a convolution of events here, and there's going to be a very fast rhythm here with a very slow moving part over the top of it." Those are the sort of visual ideas that I can draw out on graph paper. I've done a lot of film music this way.

I love you," he whispered. "I hope you don't mind.