I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.

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 great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation that five times the population of any other portion of the country.

Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.

Regardless, I did rise to the editorship before embarking on a freelance career in the late '60's.

Love at first sight is not rare, in fact it is extremely common, it happens to some people a few times a year. The feeling of what if when meeting the eyes of a stranger can be love unrecognized.

Locally and globally, we need to be doing everything we can to help Mother Earth.

Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.

God will not make himself manifest to cowards

What Great Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north.

My battles with addiction definitely shaped how I am now. They really made me deeply appreciate human contact. And the value of friends and family, how precious that is.

I think I've made a career out of making despicable people likable.