“I have a bag full of words, and when one of us comes up with a good piece of music, I look in the bag to see if anything there will fit. If nothing does, I sit down and try to put down on paper what the music makes me feel; very rarely will a piece of writing inspire a piece of music.”
CANOE 1996
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Robert Smith (musician) 36
English singer, songwriter and musician 1959Related quotes

"The Candidate" in The New Yorker (31 May 2004) https://archive.is/20120909155716/www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040531fa_fact1
2004

Quoted in Slumdog' Composer Competes for Oscars, 19 February 2009, 16 December 2013, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/18/AR2009021803790.html,

Early Letters of Robert Schumann (1888), p. 82

Often misquoted as "Great music is better than it can be performed".
Source: My Life and Music (1961), p. 121

Interview: Alan Rickman on "Nobel Son" http://www.ifc.com/2008/12/alan-rickman-on-nobel-son by Aaron Hillis, IFC.com (4 December 2008)

Original: (it) La musica è senza tempo. Un bel brano di ieri, è bello oggi e sarà bello domani.
Source: prevale.net

“It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.”
Quoted in Michael Kennedy The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams ([1964] 1992) p. 302. He reportedly said this to Roy Douglas regarding whether his Symphony No.6 was meant to be programmatic.