“The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.”
“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”
“There is, however, a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like part of the act.”
“A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.”
“He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes books.”
“because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music”