I was playing in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra as principal horn. I was there for some 15 years - one of the most exciting and great musical periods in my life.

After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

If we could ever find that moment, maybe thousands of years from now, where all the musics of the worlds would be communicating with each other, there would be no more wars, there would be peace.

As rich as Cincinnati was in live music, New York was even more.

So this anchoring in some way, in some important way in the past without repeating the past, but on the basis of the past building something new: that is what is important.

If you mess around with jazz, you better have a good drummer and a good bass player.

Many people think of me as a modernist, as a radical in music, you know, someone who's always sort of at the avant-garde of musics, but I'm also quite a traditionalist.

Symphony musicians are not trained in improvising, certainly not in a jazz style.

I don't hate work, composing is not work for me, it's my pleasure; it's my life. So why should I stop? If something is pleasurable and exciting and rewarding, why should one stop?

My primary calling, I always knew since the age of 11, was as a composer, and so that had to take priority.

As long as I'm healthy and can keep going that's what I'll do.

I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

The English summer is never far away

When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.

As long as something was a mystery, there was still the potential for amazement. Maybe that's where I went wrong before. Some riddles weren't meant to be solved.

Strung out on lasers and slash back blazers.

I want to know why this is such a part of me. I want to know why this thing that happened to other people has happened so much to me. I keep looking for the lesson.

We are of course a nation of differences. Those differences don't make us weak. They're the source of our strength.

Anthropocentrism, regarding human kind as the very center and pinnacle of existence, is a disease of arrested development.

To take a gloomy view of life is not part of my philosophy; to laugh at the idiocies of my fellow creatures is. However, at this particular moment I cannot find so much to laugh at as I would like.

I believe that a sportsman should be aggressive because that is what gives him or her the power to perform even in the toughest of situations.