58 Quotes by Ned Rorem

Greatness is not the effect of which inspiration is the cause. We are all inspired, but we are all not great.

Why, after all, must everyone like music? That they are missing something is just the lover's opinion.

Intelligence is silence, truth is being invisible. But what a racket I make in declaring this.

The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience.

All men are forced into one of two categories: those with eleven fingers and those without.

As a lifelong pacifist, Quaker, and a gay man, I despair that gays and lesbians are expending energy trying to get into the military when they should be using that same energy getting rid of the military completely.

If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist.

So far as musical pedagogy is concerned - And by extension of musical creation - Nadia Boulanger is the most influential person who ever lived

To see itself through, music must have idea or magic. ... Music with neither dies young though rich.