27 Quotes by Ralph Vaughan Williams

The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo's Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City - the intuition that I had been there already.

The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough...

There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.