Arthur Eddington Quotes

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.

Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?

Masterpieces are only lucky attempts.

Mozart creates music from a mysterious center, and so knows the limits to the right and the left, above and below. He maintains moderation.

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.

The thing about being a songwriter, once you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer. ... You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years: observing people, how they react to one another, which in a way makes you weirdly distant. ... It's a little of Peeping Tom, being a song-writer.

Used to think that luck wuz luck and nuthin' else but luck-- It made no diff'rence how or when or where or why it struck; But sev'ral years ago I changt my mind, an' now proclaim That luck's a kind uv science--same as any other game.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.

We figure to ourselves The thing we like; and then we build it up, As chance will have it, on the rock or sand,- For thought is tired of wandering o'er the world, And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.

If there's 10,000 people looking at the stocks and trying to pick winners, one in 10,000 is going to score, by chance alone, a great coup, and that's all that's going on. It's a game, it's a chance operation, and people think they are doing something purposeful... but they're really not.

I always liked making things, and then I fell into animation. And then luck comes into it as well.

Songwriting requires some sort of ceremony to even get the process started, and it can be somewhat arbitrary.

I focus on the words and then I have fun putting together the music after.

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

A lot of things come together to make up a song. It's just images.

Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once (gleich dies zusammen). What a delight this is I cannot tell ! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing lively dream.

I don't choose what I compose. It chooses me.

Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.

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.

My life is a creative act--like a painting, or a concerto.

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

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

As for me, I rarely write a song. But when I do write a song, like "Ain't No Chimneys in the Projects," which came to me at three a.m. one morning, on a whim - I get a percentage.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.