In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

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.

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.

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God.

On a silent moonlit night look at the sky and see yourself dancing with those distant twinkling stars.

You should be patient to wait for what you want.

Most arguments are useless.

The real fun of living wisely is that you get to be smug about it.

Vocally, I really like going into the darker side of myself.

Sometimes he could almost forget that it was there, the way you forget about the sky or the earth underfoot, but there were other times when it seemed as if there was nothing else in the world.

A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.

I would be quite happy never to play any of my better-known songs again. But unless you're Dylan, you can't afford to completely disregard what your audience wants.

I still hate [the Eagles]…. There’s levels of evil in it to me.