By the visual pattern, but mostly I'm guided entirely by my ear, what I hear.

Improvisation is terribly haphazard.

To the person that deals in visualizations, I suppose there is something rather exciting about a whole set of people - they all going symmetrically, up or down, in a military sort of precision.

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.

The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment.

I distrust anything that you don't hear.

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

Hopefully, I have a certain amount of what you call musical talent.

I think there have been some periods when the writing almost became a bit of a burden.

But in the end, music is ultimately an aural art, pure and simple.

I don't think about how to live my life. I just live it.

Bad memories were hard enough, but it was torture to be haunted by the good.

I believe the approach of the artist and the approach of the environmentalist are fairly close in that both are, to a rather impressive degree, concerned with the affirmation of life.

We do not benefit from a relationship with China or any other country in which we put our values and our ideals aside.

What was distinctively Western was not slavery but the moral crusade to end slavery.

Art is everywhere you look for it, hail the twinkling stars for they are God's careless splatters

True courage is born only when it is accompanied by justice.

O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.

There's always something every night that I learn from reacting to what the audience is reacting to. You learn what to leave out, what to put in, if you need a little more comedy or more drama.