“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”

From a 1957 interview
Truman Capote: Conversations (1987)

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Truman Capote26

American author 1924–1984

Ilsa J. Bick (1957) American writer

Source: Ashes

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

On the loss of a suitcase containing work from his first two years as a writer, as quoted in With Hemingway (1984) by Arnold Samuelson

“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.”

E.L. Doctorow (1931–2015) novelist, editor, professor

“Writing music for a picture means you have to compromise with a given reference to a movie or the advice coming from the director and producer. Working on your own material, you have to be just authentic with yourself, following your subjective perspectives and ideas. There is no-one who will judge what you are doing as long as you are in the composing process. Both ways are very different but can support your input learning about the musical universe immensely.”

Edgar Froese (1944–2015) German musician and founder of Tangerine Dream

“I can respect the artistic aim of a composer if he arrives at the so-called modern idiom after an intense period of preparation…Such composers know what they are doing when they break a law; they know what to react against, because they have had experience in the classical forms and style. Having mastered the rules, they know which can be violated and which should be obeyed. But, I am sorry to say, I have found too often that young composers plunge into the writing of experimental music with their school lessons only half learned. Too much radical music is sheer sham, for this very reason: its composer sets about revolutionizing the laws of music before he learned them himself.”

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) Russian composer, pianist, and conductor

Interviewed by David Ewen in The Etude, 1941; cited from Josiah Fisk and Jeff Nichols (eds.) Composers on Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern Universities Press, 1997) pp. 235-6