I am an inventor of music.

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.

May we always be burdened with thinking of the suffering of others, for that is what it means to be human.

Life is a lonely bussiness

You don't have to be like most people around you, because most people never become truly rich and wealthy.

If your life does not worship God, your lips do not worship God either.

I grew up with a glue gun pointed at my head.

Actions lie louder than words.

You have to believe in happiness, or happiness never comes.

People who don't make goals end up working for those who do.

There are two of them up here.

Endeavour to play easy pieces well and with elegance; that is better than to play difficult pieces badly.