Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized

Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.

Please don't try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have -- I want it that way.

Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

I don't write music for sissy ears.

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.

But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

A child’s laughter is one of the most beautiful things on this earth. It can fill the whole world with passionate joy.

The intellect perpetuates the worldly life.

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.

he knew that men were too complex to be defined by the worst moment in their lives

Willingly no one chooses the yoke of slavery.

There's a deep-seated paranoia that Americans have about not being Americans or something.

When something undesirable grows in my soul, I ask God to give me the courage to mercilessly pluck it out.

It was dangerous to hit the wrong kid in my neighborhood, because a lot of the guys I played with had fathers in the Mafia.

I was young and felt like it was opportunity 'cause they were moving units back then on the underground scene.

A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.