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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.

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
Well
Long
Inhale
Success
Wells

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
Leonard Bernstein
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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
Leonard Bernstein
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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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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Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
Leonard Bernstein
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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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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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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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.
Leonard Bernstein
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Leonard Bernstein
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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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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
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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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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Leonard Bernstein
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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.
Leonard Bernstein
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
Leonard Bernstein
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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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From New Year's on the outlook brightens good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
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.
Leonard Bernstein
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I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series.
Leonard Bernstein