I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about 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've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives.

Life reality tells us that to grow physically, you first need to grow inwardly

Behind each number is a person, a victim, whose individual story is ghastly.

The magical, supernatural force that is with us every second is time. We can't even comprehend it. It's such an illusion, it's such a strange thing.

Every year when it's Chinese New Year here in New York, there are fireworks going off at all hours. New York mothers calm their frightened children by telling them it's just gunfire.

Humility is the mother of giants.

Love without trust is a river without water.

A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!

The greatest superstition now entertained by public men is that hypocrisy is the royal road to success.

I think my music is great for film, but I don't have the opportunity, or goesche to go and pitch myself to Hollywood.