An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.

Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received.

There are certainly a good number of alternatives to "shit, " if you have a particular need to express such a feeling.

The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn't let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

Shakespeare teaches you how to act. You come out of this process as a better actor. It's just the nature of the words he writes.

There's times to be dainty and times to be a pig.

I think this is pretty clear, but maybe not to everybody: Despite the fact that the work is personal or taken from life, it's not about me telling my personal story.

To boast that one never flirts is actually a kind of flirtation.

I feel like in a conversation if things get said and then repeated, it sort of becomes inherently part of the narrative whether you want it to be or not.

Without fear we must set sail on the digital sea.

Nobody here's for open borders. When undocumented people are apprehended, they should be sent back to wherever they came from.