I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God.

The composer...joins Heaven and Earth with threads of sounds.

My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound.

I found a greater identity with my own emotions in the Armenian culture as I grew older, as well as from the beginning, although I didn't know anything about it.

This is not to say that the Scots are not fine people, but they were all sort of... well, my grandfather was a minister and sort of Protestant, and this was rather depressing to me.

It's hard for me to think of others because I'm not particularly in sympathy with the music of this century.

I was born in Somerville, but I don't remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.

My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland.

To me, atonality is against nature. There is a center to everything that exists. The planets have the sun, the earth, the moon.

I did all kinds of things in order to earn a living.

The greater the emotional intensity, the greater the simplicity.

Thoughts are divine.

Good and quiet do not connote weakness.

Guide valiantly.Guide venerably.Guide valiantly.Guide virtuously.

Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely.

It's not enough just being a good passer of the ball.

In the corridors under tehre is nothing but sleep. And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep On moon-washed apples of wonder.

Big breaks come from small fractures.

Virtue is health, vice is sickness.

The very inclusion of the right to keep and bear arms in the Bill of Rights shows that the framers of the Constitution considered it an individual right.

If you're not busy living, you're dying.