I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces.

The only love affair I have ever had was with music.

Why become a second-rate Ravel when you're already a first-rate Gershwin?

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art

I do not ask for my music to be interpreted, but only for it to be played.

I begin by considering an effect.

You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.

If he'd been making shell-cases during the war it might have been better for music.

To George Gershwin, on refusinghim as a pupil: You would only lose the spontaneous quality of your melody, and end by writing bad Ravel.

Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!

Daily ripples of excellence -over time- become a tsunami of success

When stupidity knocks at the door, it is stupidity that opens it.

The thing I loved the most - and still love the most about teaching - is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits.

I try to make sure that, when I'm writing, I don't put too much Cody in it. But I don't want to lose it either.

Much that passes for education is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when we know it least.

All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals.

You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.

Act non-action; undertake no undertaking; taste the tasteless.

Life is a glorious banquet, a limitless and delicious buffet.

All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.