Gian Carlo Menotti quotes:

I really don't think I have that much of the gift; I have a little bit, but I wish I were Schubert or Chopin or Beethoven, though Beethoven had a very difficult time writing melody, too.

Waiting and hoping are the whole of life, and as soon as a dream is realized it is destroyed.

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.

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.

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

I know of no better definition of love than the one given by Proust - Love is space and time measured by the heart.

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

One lived in the impression that nobody could ever compete with the 'Nutcracker' or 'A Christmas Carol.'

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

The Greeks said the artist doesn't actually have to travel and look around. You stay where God has put you, and you dig as deep as you can. This is what I've done.

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.

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

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

The only thing that interests me in music is to be able to reach into the, let's call it, 'collective unconscious' of what is noblest in the human spirit, the way you find in the music of Mozart and Beethoven and Verdi that wonderful quality that not a note can be changed.

Writing beautiful melodies is not fashionable because it is very difficult to do.

As a little boy of 3 or 4, I became lame. Something was wrong with my right leg. There are pictures of me being pulled around in a little wagon. The doctors didn't know what to do. So my nanny took me to the miraculous Madonna at Sacro Monte in Varese, the priest blessed me, and I walked.

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

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.

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

At the premieres, I always watch the audience. If a child asks to go to the bathroom, I know I've failed.

I thought conceptual art was a joke.

A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance.

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

Not an audience but a habit

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 have the feeling that everybody was waiting for me to die so they could rediscover me. Then they found out I'm not dead yet, so they are rediscovering me while I'm still alive.

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.

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

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

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