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.

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

Be good.See good.Choose good.It's a no-brainer.

Someone you love has at least one secret that would break your heart.

A ploughman on his legs is higher than a gentleman on his knees.

You had better live your best and act your best and think your best today for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.

No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.

The only way to be an actor is to find ways to work as an actor, even if that means doing a one-man show by a river.

Familiarity breeds contentment.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

Unanimously we will confess and pledge ourselves to stand behind the Fuehrer and his movement today and forever and thereby to be of service to the idea of eternal Germany.