George Gershwin Quotes

To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box.

You're not gonna write a hundred songs and have a hundred entirely different ideas. It's a matter of finding the ones that are the freshest and most unique.

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

I would rather have ideas and some difficulties of technique than a perfect technique and no ideas.

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

Originality is the only thing that counts. But the originator uses material and ideas that occur round him and pass through him. And out of his experience comes the original creation.

composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

Sometimes listening to music can motivate you. It can. But if you're a musician, that isn't always the way to get new ideas because you don't want to take somebody else's ideas. You need to find your own. So if you go to different artistic mediums, whether it's dance or it's visual arts or films or books, stories, sometimes it gets you hearing things, hearing progressions that you wouldn't come up with if you were just listening to other music because you don't want to copy progressions you've just heard.

There's nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn't exist before - I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.

He lives with his creativity in high gear.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

As a director, you try to find what is creative.

I love originating shows and originating songs - there is nothing better than being the first one to get to do a song.

I wanted to make sounds that I'd never heard before.

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art.

I'm interested in creating new work.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.

Usually one or two things happen: Either you have an idea straightaway - the sort of sound that you want or the instrumentation or one particular sound that you want to feature - or you don't.

It's very important to understand that we never do the same thing twice; each of our projects is unique. We'll never do another 'Gates.' Each project is a unique image. We do not know in advance how the work will look. I do preparatory drawings, but they are only projections of our vision.

I am an inventor of music.

So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.