If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It's useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Incidentally, I only have one cavity, and as much as my dentist asks me to, I just can't bring myself to floss.

I don't know what Alex did to piss this poisonous cow off, but now I want blood.

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animals

My grandmother's brain was dead, but her heart was still beating. It was the first time we ever had a democrat in the family.

God, I pray light these idle sticks of my life and may I burn up for thee.

The distance between taking social action and having the knowledge is as wide as the mouth of the Mississippi.

Believe you can, and you can. Belief is one of the most powerful of all problem dissolvers. When you believe that a difficulty can be overcome, you are more than halfway to victory over it already.

Real change will come when powerful women are less of an exception. It is easy to dislike senior women because there are so few.

So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.