Composition is selective improvisation.

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.

The God that humanity so keenly seeks, lives within the human biology, yet they wander hitherto searching for it.

You must look through an opportunity and not at it

If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end.

You know you're in lust when you're quick to fall into a reverie because dreams seem better than reality.

You think beautiful girls are going to stay in style forever? I should say not! Any minute now they're going to be out! Finished! Then it'll be my turn!

When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet.

Sun Tzu does not need my praise. His work has lived for over two thousand years, and will surely live for another two thousand without any help from me.

On Twitter, I just want to make you laugh at all costs.

It was very unusual to employ prettiness as part of a building.

The man that hails you Tom or Jack, and proves by thumps upon your back how he esteems your merit, is such a friend, that one had need be very much his friend indeed to pardon or to bear it.