I've been writing music since I was 9. I took harmony and counterpoint classes when I was studying the clarinet. So, I've been writing for an awfully long time. It just became part of everyday life.

Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.

You can find the whole world of a film in one instrument, or you can find a world of sound in the orchestra.

I have to feel something emotionally on the story to be able to write for it. I turn things down if I don't feel I'm really right to tell that particular story.

The art of making films is a collaborative art. As a composer, you're always working with the cinematographer because he's so much the heart of the world they've created on film.

Film music really is about point of view and you can shift it wherever you want really depending on how you look at it.

Sometimes you want to use the music in a clarity way to explain something in the film.

When you're working on a film, it's intense and it's very all-consuming. There's not something in particular.

Theater and film are essentially the same - just different kinds of storytelling.

I live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. and spend time in the West Village, where my wife Elizabeth Cotnoir, a writer-producer and documentary filmmaker, has an office.

When you start on a new film, no matter how many you've done before that, I think I've done close to 80 films, but it's always kind of a fun adventure.

If I had the choice, I would sing only love songs.

People that are scared of the dark have great imaginations and are my kind of people. Those who see nothing in the darkness are boring.

Don’t be stupider than you need to be, I remind myself. Remember Calease? The last glowing girl you talked to tried to kill you.

Status: the perpetual carrot that entices us from the front and prods us in the back.

Appearance matters a great deal because you can often tell a lot about people by looking at how they present themselves.

A recurring image in the work of the Rossetti circle was that of a woman absorbed in self-contemplation, gazing into a mirror or combing her hair.

I told my sons to remember to always thank people for compliments.

President [Barack] Obama, it took him a number of days to do [appointments to Administration] and it took former President Bill Clinton even longer.

I'm happy to keep doing science and being a mentor to anyone who asks for advice.

What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.