Daily Inspiration Quote by Ned Rorem

Humor, for Ned Rorem, isn’t a punchline so much as a compositional skill: the ear for simultaneity. “Three sides to one coin” tweaks the old cliché (two sides) by smuggling in the artist’s favorite move - the third angle that shouldn’t exist, but does. That extra “side” is where wit lives: in the refusal to accept a tidy binary, in the pleasure of catching reality mid-modulation.

Rorem was a composer with a diarist’s eye and a critic’s impatience for cant. His music often prizes clarity and line, but his public voice - especially in his journals - can be tart, elegant, sometimes cutting. The quote’s subtext is a defense of intelligence as play: humor isn’t merely levity; it’s perception under pressure, the capacity to hold contradiction without turning it into a sermon. The coin is a little emblem of the everyday - fixed, ordinary, transactional. Seeing three sides suggests a mind that won’t let the mundane stay flat.

There’s also a quiet rebuke here to moral grandstanding. Two sides is the posture of argument; three sides is the posture of artistry. In Rorem’s world, where taste, sexuality, ambition, and reputations all circulate like currency, humor becomes a survival tactic and an aesthetic principle. It lets you acknowledge the system you’re inside of while slipping, for a beat, outside its rules. That “ability” matters: it’s trained, not innate, like harmony.