Leonard Bernstein citations

“Any great work of art … 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.”

“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.”

“So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?”

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”

“I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.”

“Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.”

“The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act two: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act three: Greed and hypocrisy … I don't dare continue.”

“The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together — with a thin paste of flour and water… I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky… but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.”

“The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world.”

“Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.”

“This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully,
more devotedly than ever before.”

“Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning… except its own.”

“I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.”

“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.”

“To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation.”

“Callas? She was pure electricity.”