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

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.

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?

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.

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.

While clothes may not make the woman, they certainly have a strong effect on her self-confidence, which, I believe, does make the woman.

The excellence of every art is its intensity capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own.

I have always loved the Bay Area. I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. I started my career there. That's a huge part of the excitement for me.

American families only spend 17 minutes a day on average having time together.

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas.

I know there are some actors who are just brilliant at improvising and brilliant at just being in the moment and doing it there and then. I'm not one of those actors.

Enthusiasm attracts more passengers and energizes them during the ride.

Most parents don't worry about a daughter until she fails to show up for breakfast.

I've always had a fighter's spark in me. I was born with it. I think it's in my blood.