I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.

Art is not only about angst.

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

I don't know. It's been terribly hard for me. How do I know you won't do it again?''Nobody is ever quite sure of what they will do. You aren't sure what you might do.

Knowledge makes you strong, understanding makes you formidable, wisdom makes you powerful, and love makes you invincible.

Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it.

What man is there that does not laboriously though all unconsciously himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life.

In modern America, Judeo-Christian beliefs are often held up to ridicule and disdain by the media.

Leonid Brezhnev did not understand the enormous political importance of the decision to produce and afterwards deploy the SS-20s.

Even before we . . . had reached 300 feet, I recognized that the sky would be my home. I tumbled out of the airplane with stars in my eyes.

In bringing up a child, think of its old age.

From the outside, I seem happy a lot. But, I'm human and it's not possible to always be happy.