I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

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.

What you can't get out of get into wholeheartedly.

Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can't know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.

We create in people through our actions and example. In this way people around us become reflections of our own behavioral patterns and internal energies.

No man's credit is ever as good as his money.

Some hearts are hidden, some have not a heart.

I watch a lot of baseball on the radio.

Jail was preferable. There they only limited you physically. In a mental ward they tampered with your soul and worldview and mind.

If we fail, let us try again and again until we succeed.

I always wanted attention, and I realized I could make people laugh.

Life is too short to learn everything by personal experience.