George Gershwin

"I frequently hear music in the heart of noise."

"The European boys have small ideas but they sure know how to dress em up."

"My people are American, my time is today…music must repeat the thought and aspirations of the times."

"Not many composers have ideas. Far more of them know how to use strange instruments which do not require ideas."

"A skyscraper is at the same time a triumph of the machine and a tremendous emotional experience, almost breath-taking. Not merely its height but its mass and proportions are the result of an emotion, as well as of calculation."

"I like to think of music as an emotional science."

"An entire composition written in jazz could not live."

"There is no better way to spend an evening than listening to George Gershwin at the piano. Fortunately for his audience, he seldom was away from it. He played his own tunes to Iras special lyrics and though his voice was pure gravel it was special entertainment."

"The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. Its a string of separate paragraphs stuck together – with a thin paste of flour and water… I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky…but if you want to speak of a composer, thats another matter."

"Gershwins tragedy was not that he failed to cross the tracks, but rather that he did, and once there in his new habitat, was deprived of the chance to plunge his roots firmly into the new soil."

"[I]ts only good songs that last, not good rhythm, and in the first six years or so of his composing George was interested mainly in developing new rhythms."

"Gershwins melodic gift was phenomenal. His songs contain the essence of New York in the 1920s and have deservedly become classics of their kind, part of the 20th-century folk-song tradition in the sense that they are popular music which has been spread by oral tradition (for many must have sung a Gershwin song without having any idea who wrote it)."