It's hard for me to think of others because I'm not particularly in sympathy with the music of this century.

The composer...joins Heaven and Earth with threads of sounds.

I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God.

My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound.

I found a greater identity with my own emotions in the Armenian culture as I grew older, as well as from the beginning, although I didn't know anything about it.

This is not to say that the Scots are not fine people, but they were all sort of... well, my grandfather was a minister and sort of Protestant, and this was rather depressing to me.

I was born in Somerville, but I don't remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.

My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland.

To me, atonality is against nature. There is a center to everything that exists. The planets have the sun, the earth, the moon.

I did all kinds of things in order to earn a living.

The greater the emotional intensity, the greater the simplicity.

...isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all the advertising men who create it?

I do not recommend writing a screenplay in two weeks.

Those who are truly beautiful go out of their way to make life beautiful for others.

They say love is blind . . . and marriage is an insritution. Well I'm nor ready for an instirurion for rhe blind just yet.

The way we see the world is not actually the world in itself. What we see is our idea of it. The truth is, we have no notion of what the world is other than through the veils of our perception.

The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words.

"This is now the twelfth day of rioting in France. They have been rioting for almost two weeks. And France has still not surrendered. That's like a record.

A Little Birdie Told Me It's Your Birthday! So Enjoy Your Special Day!

We have to be irrational and vindictive, because that's going to frighten people. And we have to maintain this for years. And then we'll be able to carry out the actions that we want to carry out.

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.