As rich as Cincinnati was in live music, New York was even more.

After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

If we could ever find that moment, maybe thousands of years from now, where all the musics of the worlds would be communicating with each other, there would be no more wars, there would be peace.

So this anchoring in some way, in some important way in the past without repeating the past, but on the basis of the past building something new: that is what is important.

If you mess around with jazz, you better have a good drummer and a good bass player.

Many people think of me as a modernist, as a radical in music, you know, someone who's always sort of at the avant-garde of musics, but I'm also quite a traditionalist.

Symphony musicians are not trained in improvising, certainly not in a jazz style.

I don't hate work, composing is not work for me, it's my pleasure; it's my life. So why should I stop? If something is pleasurable and exciting and rewarding, why should one stop?

I was playing in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra as principal horn. I was there for some 15 years - one of the most exciting and great musical periods in my life.

My primary calling, I always knew since the age of 11, was as a composer, and so that had to take priority.

As long as I'm healthy and can keep going that's what I'll do.

The past is just a story we tell ourselves.

I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.

When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'

Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.

He knows what I'm thinking. Always. We're connected. The atoms between us ferry messages back and forth.

Forgiving other people who have wronged us or hurt us or embarrassed us is not easy. In fact, sometimes it seems impossible. But that is what God did for us and what He asks us to do for others.

Art is long. Life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.

I live with carpe diem engraved on my heart.

I think it's sinful to give the audience material it knows already, whether the material is about race relations or the car culture or the depiction and placement of a candy bar.

A fair day's wage for a fair day's work": it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.