Jonathan Cott > Quotes

“There's a theme that appears in much of your work," I say to Maurice on my last visit to Connecticut, "and I can only hint at it because it's difficult to formulate or describe. It has something to do with the lines: 'As I went over the water/the water went over me' [from As I Went over the Water] or 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me' [from Night Kitchen]."

"Obviously I have one theme, and it's even in the book I'm working on right now. It's not that I have such original ideas, just that I'm good at doing variations on the same idea over and over again. You can't imagine how relieved I was to find out that Henry James admitted he had only a couple of themes and that all of his books were based on them. That's all we need as artists - one power-driven fantasy or obsession, then to be clever enough to do variations… like a series of variations by Mozart. They're so good that you forget they're based on one theme. The same things draw me, the same images…"

"What is this one obsession?"

"I'm not about to tell you - not because it's a secret, but because I can't verbalize it."

"There's a line by Bob Dylan in 'Just Like a Woman' which talks about being 'inside the rain.'"

"Inside the rain?"

"When it's raining outside," I explain, "I often feel inside myself, as if I were inside the rain… as if the rain were my self. That's the sense I get from Dylan's image and from your books as well."

"It's strange you say that," Maurice answers, "because rain has become one of the potent images of my new book. It sort of scares me that you mentioned that line. Maybe that's what rain means. It's such an important ingredient in this new work, and I've never understood what it meant. There was a thing about me and rain when I was a child: if I could summon it up in one sentence, I'd be happy to. It's such connected tissue…”
― Jonathan Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children's Literature

“So there I am standing in the wings. All atremble with these two little pills in my pocket … And I took them out and looked at them and said, ‘I’m going to do this on my own. I am not going to take any pills. I don’t want any aid from anybody but God,’ and I just flung them across the entire backstage and strode out, and that’s the last thing I remember until the end of the concert when I saw the entire audience there, standing and cheering and screaming. But from the time of my entrance until the time of my last exit I remember nothing. There’s nothing I can tell you. It was all a dream.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Bernstein observed that the composer was “born in the spring and died in the spring. In a sense, he lived his whole life in a springtime of creativity. All his music is springlike, newly budding, rooted in the familiar past, yet fresh and sharp, with that stinging, paradoxical combination of the inevitable and the unexpected.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Aaron Copland, whom Bernstein had met when he was in his junior year at Harvard and who would become a lifelong friend and mentor, wrote him encouraging letters. “Don’t expect miracles,” Copland advised the young man, “and don’t get depressed if nothing happens for a while. That’s NY.” But on August 25, 1943, his twenty-fifth birthday, Bernstein got his first professional break when Artur Rodzinski, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, chose him to become his conducting assistant. “I have gone through all the conductors I know of in my mind,” Rodzinski explained to his new assistant, “and I finally asked God whom I should take, and God said, ‘Take Bernstein.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Sometime between four o’clock and dawn, Bernstein returned home with a hangover. At nine in the morning, he was awakened by a phone call from the Philharmonic’s associate manager who told him, “Well, this is it. You have to conduct at three o’clock. No chance of a rehearsal. You will report at a quarter of three backstage.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“I was talking about pounding a nail in a board, it seems like there’s a board there and all the nails are pounded in all over the place, you know, and every new person that comes to pound in a nail finds that there’s one less space, you know. I hope we haven’t got to the end of the space yet.”
― Jonathan Cott, Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews

“the artist’s job is not to get locked into any period,”
― Jonathan Cott, Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

“Bernstein nevertheless received Nixon’s highest accolade when, on the Watergate Tapes, the president is heard calling the composer a “son of a bitch.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“I have opened my belly and placed you inside.”
― Jonathan Cott, City of Earthly Love: Poems

“The only moments I have when I play that are worth anything to me are when I can blissfully ignore the people I am supposed to be entertaining. No me; no silly public to amuse; only the heart and the soul, the world, the birds, storms, dreams, sadness, heavenly serenity. Then I am an artist worthy of the name . . . . Until it happens, or if it doesn’t happen, I am miserable.”
― Jonathan Cott, Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews

“None of would've made it alone" John once explained, "because Paul wasn't strong enough, I didn't have enough girl-appeal, George was too quiet, and Ringo was the drummer. But we thought everyone would be able to dig at least one of us, and that's how it turned out.”
― Jonathan Cott, Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

“Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“People are always judging or criticizing you, or focusing on what you’re trying to say on one little album, on one little song, but to me it’s a lifetime’s work.”
― Jonathan Cott, Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

“Anything of a serious nature isn’t “instant”—you can’t “do” the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God’s sake?”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Se você fica sabendo de uma coisa — e isso é uma lei natural —, não pode mais não saber.”
― Jonathan Cott, Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

“WOW!” A GALVANIZED Igor Stravinsky reportedly exclaimed after listening to Leonard Bernstein’s astonishing recording of The Rite of Spring—a still-unsurpassed performance that Columbia Records captured more than fifty years ago in a single inspired and electrically charged recording session on January 20, 1958, in New York City.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Woman” is the grownup version of “Girl.”
― Jonathan Cott, Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

“I was astonished at how wonderful these books were; and even though I was occasionally discomforted when someone, having asked me what book I had in my pocket, looked aghast when I pulled out a copy of Heidi or Finn Family Moomintroll, I soon realized that my then-present condition of "second childhood" was not one of senility and depression but of renewal and awakening.”
― Jonathan Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children's Literature

“Look at the score and make it come alive as if [you] were the composer. If you can do that, you're a conductor and if you can't, you're not. If I don't become Brahms or Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky when I'm conducting their works, then it won't be a great performance.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“the blue mountain's soft lines were like the dampness glowing in the moss”
― Jonathan Cott, City of Earthly Love: Poems

“she also thought it would be helpful to send Bernstein a copy of a book of conversations I had done with the pianist Glenn Gould, who, it turned out, was one of Bernstein’s musical heroes, as well as a close and adored friend. It was a long wait, but at last, in September of 1989, Maggie telephoned to give me the good news that I had passed Harry Kraut’s audition, that Bernstein had read my book, and that he had not only agreed to give me an interview but had also suggested that we do so over dinner at his country home in Connecticut on November 20.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Надо ведь двигаться, перемещаться в пространстве. Я не смогла бы год или даже десять месяцев в году жить только в Нью-Йорке. Эта жизнь ведь совершенно искусственная. Хотя - ну и что такого? Следует создать собственное пространство - такое, в котором господствует тишина и где много-много книг.”
― Jonathan Cott

“None of us would have made it alone" John once explained, "because Paul wasn't strong enough, I didn't have enough girl-appeal, George was too quiet, and Ringo was the drummer. But we thought everyone would be able to dig at least one of us, and that's how it turned out.”
― Jonathan Cott, Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

“(In 1945, the producer Hal Wallis of Paramount Pictures seriously discussed the idea of making a “biopic” in which Bernstein would have played Tchaikovsky and Greta Garbo would have played Baroness von Meck, the composer’s patroness.)”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“he received a letter of admonition from his mother, Jennie: “Lenny dear,” she wrote, “please don’t tell reporters of your personal views…it’s very bad taste. It will not do you much good. It may have bad repercussions. From now on you should be very conservative in your statements to the public. Just a little advice from your mother and I’m sure it will not harm you.” Bernstein did not heed his mother’s advice; and it is unsettling to discover that during the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept an active file of almost seven hundred pages on Bernstein’s political opinions and activities from as early as the mid-1940s.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein