Aaron Copland

But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn’s 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn’s 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.

I hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.

Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped.

Those unproductive hands … may consume so great a share … that all the frugality and good conduct of individuals may not be able to compensate … this violent and forced encroachment.

Like an enemy I knew as intimately as any friend, I came to know the nagging, constant emptiness of the incongruent life. I ignored myself and lived for people, purposes, and goals that weren’t my own. I betrayed who I was and instead accepted a fictional substitute that was defined from the outside in.

People cannot discover new lands until they have the courage to lose sight of the shore.

Character is what you have left when you’ve lost everything you can lose.

Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars.

If I was on the air and was just kind of a plain-vanilla personality that took the safe road and the safe way trying to please all of the people all of the time, I’d been gone in two weeks.

Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth, or the only truth.

Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind.

All begins with you surrounding yourself with the right people—the good and authentic people—and “unsurrounding” yourself with the wrong people. And we both know there are plenty of wrong people in this world.

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or the fourteenth.

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Life on the road is murder. It’s as though life begins and ends with your horn in your mouth.

That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.