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

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.

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

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.

If your children know who God is they will know who they are, regardless of where you or they call home.

I think it's useful to keep in mind I've been now President for over seven years and gun sales don't seem to have suffered during that time.

The public has heard the stereotypical love songs a million times, and they've heard the stereotypical life-or-death songs millions of times. It's good to mix it up a little bit.

To be sure a stepmother to a girl is a different thing to a second wife to a man!

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

Happy the life, that in a peaceful stream, Obscure, unnoticed through the vale has flow'd; The heart that ne'er was charm'd by fortune's gleam Is ever sweet contentment's blest abode.

What if capitalism is unsustainable, and socialism is impossible?

I didn't always walk that straight line. I'm not going to say that I'm an angel. But I made some right decisions along the way.

It's not what I don't know that bothers me - it's what I do know and don't do!

I'm destined to live and say things.