It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Life without music is unthinkable.

It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.

The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

My heart broke and my mind opened, tragedy works in a funny way like that ~ what once tore me apart was actually what was setting my truth free.

The star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention.

In India I've been to all the award functions, but that was in Hindi; now it's in English so it's a much bigger scale.

Religion helps you relate with the universe. Buddha was indifferent to the concept of god yet he gave us values.

Have you noticed that all you need to grow healthy, vigorous grass is a crack in your sidewalk? Having a baby is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.

I grew up in a religious environment, and I'm proud of it.

Enron CEO Kenneth Lay has apparently just slipped across the border into Pakistan.

Comedy keeps the heart sweet.

So the actual privilege is that you can then take time off - and if you don't, you're a fool. You're earning all this money to support children whom you then don't see, which is absurd.

And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws.