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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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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
Broadway
Composer
Jewish
Gay
Success
Must

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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.
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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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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.
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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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.
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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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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.
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Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.
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Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.
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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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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.
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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
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Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great he is free from the experience of hostility he is a poet, and most like an angel.
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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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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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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