Top 40 Ned Rorem Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.”

— Ned Rorem

2. “Nothing is a waste that makes a memory.”

— Ned Rorem

3. “It’s not evil that’s ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.”

— Ned Rorem

4. “Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future.”

— Ned Rorem

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

— Ned Rorem

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

— Ned Rorem

7. “Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.”

— Ned Rorem

8. “Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out, while Romantic grows from outside in.”

— Ned Rorem

9. “Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.”

— Ned Rorem

10. “Love is a mystery which, when solved, evaporates. The same holds for music.”

— Ned Rorem

11. “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.”

— Ned Rorem

12. “An artist doesn’t necessarily have deeper feelings than other people, but he can express these feelings. He is like everyone else-only more so! He speaks with a Formal Sigh.”

— Ned Rorem

13. “The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty.”

— Ned Rorem

14. “Artists, by definition innocent, don’t steal. But they do borrow without giving back.”

— Ned Rorem

15. “The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of.”

— Ned Rorem

16. “Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet.”

— Ned Rorem

17. “Art means to dare – and to have been right.”

— Ned Rorem

18. “Minor artists borrow, great ones steal.”

— Ned Rorem

19. “Sooner or later you’ve heard all your best friends have to say. Then comes the tolerance of real love.”

— Ned Rorem

20. “Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes. Frigidaires are perfect. Beauty limps. My frigidaire has had to be replaced.”

— Ned Rorem

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

— Ned Rorem

22. “Don’t be too dismissive of children. While it’s true that few children are artists, all artists are children.”

— Ned Rorem

23. “In music the present is extended.”

— Ned Rorem

24. “I don’t go to concerts much. I’ve heard everything. When I do go to movies, I walk out half the time. As for literature, I’ve read everything.”

— Ned Rorem

25. “Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.”

— Ned Rorem

26. “Compose first, worry later.”

— Ned Rorem

27. “Anyone can be gay – it’s no accomplishment – but only I can be me.”

— Ned Rorem

28. “Quarrels in France strengthen a love affair, in America they end it.”

— Ned Rorem

29. “Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes.”

— Ned Rorem

30. “If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.”

— Ned Rorem

31. “Art’s the biggest vanity: the assumption that one’s view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.”

— Ned Rorem

32. “There are no fascinating people, only their works are fascinating.”

— Ned Rorem

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

— Ned Rorem

34. “Divine fires do not blaze each day, but an artist functions in their afterglow hoping for their recurrence.”

— Ned Rorem

35. “The Great don’t innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, they leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they’ve manured. A deceptive memory may be the key to their originality.”

— Ned Rorem

36. “We endow our poor lovers with godly traits, and then destroy them for being mortal.”

— Ned Rorem

37. “If you read reviews of concerts, the word ‘creative’ comes up all the time. However, performers playing music usually aren’t creative. Critics might say they are, but they’re just playing another persons work. They didn’t create it.”

— Ned Rorem

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

— Ned Rorem

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

— Ned Rorem

40. “To start writing about your life is, from one standpoint, to stop living it. You must avoid adventures today so as to make time for registering those of yesterday.”

— Ned Rorem