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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

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
Live
Without
Thinking
Studying
Hearing
Playing
Study
Music

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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.
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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.
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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
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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Leonard Bernstein
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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Leonard Bernstein
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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.
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
Leonard Bernstein
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Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.
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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
Leonard Bernstein
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
Leonard Bernstein
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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.
Leonard Bernstein
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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein
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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Leonard Bernstein
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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