It is obvious that anything a scientist discovers or invents is based on previous discoveries and inventions. The same applies to the arts.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

Most artists have experienced the creative block. We get stuck in our work. We beat our head against the wall: nothing. Sometimes, it is because we are trying something at the wrong time.

Personality is essential. It is in every work of art. When someone walks on stage for a performance and has charisma, everyone is convinced that he has personality. I find that charisma is merely a form of showmanship. Movie stars usually have it. A politician has to have it.

It is the element I miss in electronic music - no performance, no loving immersion. Maybe that is why I was never particularly drawn to electronic music.

When I went back to visit my native Berlin after World War II, I noticed that the only thing I really remembered from my childhood Berlin days is the shoe store.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own.

Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist.

The fact that Stravinsky used the classics as a major influence is obvious. What is interesting is how he used them, how he turned Bach into Stravinsky.

To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius.

Any creator owes a debt to past creation.

Yes, influences are enriching, and they can be found in every work of art, even the most original.

Great music does not just make me feel good. It means something. It makes us understand. It makes us happy.

I still do not know where the notes will come from when I accept a commission for a new work.

If one uses music that one does not really love, then one will not succeed in making it one's own.

That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it.

The best way to investigate the elusive phenomenon called the creative process may well be to target all the misconceptions, to explain what the creative process is not.

To come to grips with creativity, I must ask creative, adventurous questions - the kind which, in all likelihood, cannot be answered.

The creative act is like writing a letter. A letter is a project; you don't sit down to write a letter unless you know what you want to say and to whom you want to say it.

It is obvious that anything a scientist discovers or invents is based on previous discoveries and inventions. The same applies to the arts.

There is another interesting paradox here: by immersing ourselves in what we love, we find ourselves. We do not lose ourselves. One does not lose one's identity by falling in love.

To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.

Truth implies meaning.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

My students frequently ask what their next project should be. My advice: immerse yourself in the music you love and you will find what you want to do; you will discover your next project.

Why do we pigeonhole and label an artist? It is a sure way of missing the important, the contradictory, the things that make him or her unique.

Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it.

Truth is a big concept.

For years that may mean imitation. Then, one day, it is like a door opening, and a new thought comes in. Why not try this instead. Suddenly he is doing something original, almost in spite of himself.

As I sit down and start to work, I often panic. I stare at the empty piece of music paper. How can I say that my piece will be ready for performance next January when I do not have a recipe for making it happen?

In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word inspiration began to replace the word idea in the arts.

I don't dare postulate about science, but I know that it takes both emotion and intellect in order for art to happen.

This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

Community colleges are one of America's great social inventions a gateway to the future for first time students looking for an affordable college education, and for mid-career students looking to get ahead in the workplace.

People never knew we were poor, but out of that poverty came the most incredible inventions - board games, recipes... we never stopped inventing.

Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.

Of all human inventions the organization, a machine constructed of people performing interdependent functions, is the most powerful.

I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

Most of them are doomed to rapid extinction, but a few may make evolutionary inventions, such as physiological, ecological, or behavioral innovations that give these species improved competitive potential.

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

But what has America to boast? What are the graces or the virtues which distinguish its inhabitants? What are their triumphs in war, or their inventions in peace?

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea that they subsequently express with their hands.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

The art of an artist must be his own art. It is... always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one's own, in one's relation to the tool, the material and the colors.

The inventions and the great discoveries have opened up whole continents to reciprocal communication and interchange, provided we are willing.

All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.

Life is composed of different inventions.