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A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
Leonard Bernstein
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Leonard Bernstein
Age: 72 †
Born: 1918
Born: August 25
Died: 1990
Died: October 14
Associate Professor
Composer
Conductor
Film Score Composer
Musicologist
Pianist
Lawrence
Massachusetts
Louis Bernstein
Answers
Contradictory
Art
Provoking
Doe
Tension
Work
Essential
Essentials
Questions
Answer
Meaning
Provokes
More quotes by Leonard Bernstein
What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.
Leonard Bernstein
The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist it is a gift we all share to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy.
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From New Year's on the outlook brightens good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
Leonard Bernstein
To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
Leonard Bernstein
You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.
Leonard Bernstein
Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.
Leonard Bernstein
Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
Leonard Bernstein
A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
Leonard Bernstein
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard Bernstein
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
Leonard Bernstein
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Leonard Bernstein
To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Leonard Bernstein
The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
Leonard Bernstein
Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
Leonard Bernstein
Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
Leonard Bernstein
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
Leonard Bernstein
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Leonard Bernstein
...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
Leonard Bernstein
It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Leonard Bernstein
