Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Life without music is unthinkable.

It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.

The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

In a crowd do not lose your individuality, and in your individuality do not lose the crowd.

There's the trick: to find the way - whether forwards or back - to what we long to be.

The people who are buying stocks because they're going up and they don't know what they do deserve to lose money.

Connecting to something keeps our empathy alive.

When power corrupts, poetry cleanses

When I was in my twenties, I thought I was bulletproof.

The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out but I'm glad I had them.

If I ever grow up, I don't want to be around for it.

In bad times and in good I've never lost my sense of zest for life.