Top 16 Quotes by John Williams

I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.

I, over the years, have always felt more comfortable if I could go into a projection room and look at a film and not really know what to expect. If you read the script first, you form all kinds of preconceptions about how things look, what the location's like, what the actors are like.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.