Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study.

Of all the species of literary composition perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed which is wanting in general history.

Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work reality often forces us to choose love or work.

Happiness is composed of misfortunes avoided.

The main foundations of every state new states as well as ancient or composite ones are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms and where there are good arms good laws inevitably follow.

A vow is a purely religious act which cannot be taken in a fit of passion. It can be taken only with a mind purified and composed and with God as witness.

The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past the present and the future that we bear within us whoever possesses but one of these terms has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.

Friendship is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

Writing is a form of therapy sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write compose or paint can manage to escape the madness melancholia the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes or fisherman's octopus and shrimps fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach.

You'll know if you're a famous composer if 20 years from now your name appears on a pull-down menu in Band in a Box alongside Hans Zimmer.

A lot of the greatest compositions were made famous by Sinatra.

A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men women an occasional animal and the common cold.

I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment... rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart such as I have felt it since my childhood.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces which represent 30% of our musical experience.

Common sense is the measure of the possible it is composed of experience and prevision it is calculation applied to life.

I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available.

When I was four years old my mother put me into a school for early music education where you get perfect pitch and harmony and composition.

I think there's a time as a writer when you want to see the best things in life and you go out wherever you go with your dreams as a writer or a composer.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams from the unconscious and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

Sometimes you start with the drawing and then the gag comes to you in the middle of it. That is when you start working on the solution of the gag which is composition placing equilibrium and character design.

When I design buildings I think of the overall composition much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space.

When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet.