Gian Carlo Menotti Quotes

I should have worked harder in my life. I suffer from a guilt complex.

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding.

Music is ... a form of remembering, a return to the seasons of the heart long gone.

I thought conceptual art was a joke.

Love, which, in concert with Abstinence, established Faith, and which, along with Patience, builds up Chastity, is like the columns that sustain the four corners of a house. For it was that same Love which planted a glorious garden redolent with precious herbs and noble flowers-roses and lilies-which breathed forth a wondrous fragrance, that garden on which the true Solomon was accustomed to feast his eyes.

It's always what you did before. The year before is always so much better. Even when the critics hated what you did then, it always looks better five years later.

Love is born of faith, lives on hope, and dies of charity.

I have a heart problem, so I have to simplify my life and be content with memories and friends and music.

I rebelled against the idea of the artist being what I call the 'after-dinner mint' of society. I didn't want them to be just the entertainers, but rather part of the community - the bread, not only the dessert.

I'm not very sympathetic to the tendency to bring art to the people.

I loathe my body. The liver spots, the sagging flesh.

There are three reasons why I live in Scotland. First, I like silence, and you have to be a millionaire to buy silence in Italy. Second, I like cold weather. Third, in Italy I have too many relatives and know too many people, so I never get a quiet time.

The Italians are very unmusical. If I go to a Protestant church in London or Amsterdam or listen to a black choir, I hear four-part harmony. Italians could never do that. In Italy, we all have to sing the melody because we cannot harmonise.

Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do.

It takes a Bobby White to make a tired 90-year-old composer write a song about love.

I can sit on a chair with a score and give myself a wonderful performance.

God gives you the gift of melody or He doesn't - it's as simple as that.

I have always felt that art, especially music, is but a demonstration of God.

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.

A Schubert song, the A-major chord at the opening of Wagner's 'Lohengrin' - such incredible beauty is a mystery, the divinity of music.

My advice to composers is, 'Try to reach 90, and everyone will love you.'

I guess I am running the risk of becoming the Hans Christian Andersen of opera.

Fate has blessed me.

For better or for worse, in 'The Last Savage,' I have dared to do away completely with fashionable dissonance, and in a modest way, I have endeavored to rediscover the nobility of gracefulness and the pleasure of sweetness.

Melody is a form of remembrance. It must have a quality of inevitability in our ears.