Any creator owes a debt to past creation.
Lukas Foss

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.
Lukas Foss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word inspiration began to replace the word idea in the arts.
Lukas Foss


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

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

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

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

Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it.
Lukas Foss

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

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

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.
Lukas Foss

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

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