Good composers don't borrow, they steal

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.

Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.

I thought I can throw away all my memories but whenever I tell my mind to do it, memories stick it more...!!

There is a definite process by which one made people into friends and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

I haven't got time for the pain.

In this I-me society, my job is to get people to buy into something bigger than themselves.

I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day

The Epistle is a correction of profession without life, and most valuable in this respect.

I am entering into the truth, into nature.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

When I film, there are no emotions. That would be the last thing.