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?
- Lukas Foss Quote

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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

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

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

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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

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

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius.
- Lukas Foss Quote

Truth is a big concept.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote

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.
- Lukas Foss Quote