Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

Art is not only about angst.

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

Control Your Own Destiny or Someone Else Will

People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.

What enables me to believe in anything is hope.

And when you wake, you will fly away, holding tight to the legs of all your angels. Goodbye, my love, into your blue, blue eyes.

I don't hide or play stupid games.

Our relationship felt like a Christmas gift that you hadn't asked for and weren't expecting to receive, but the minute you saw it, you knew it was perfect for you.

The first thing a genius needs is to breath free air.

[it is] a high class kind of subversion, very high class. We're not second story burglars. We go right in the front door.

Throw aside your scriptures in the Ganga and teach the people first the means of procuring their food and clothing, and then you will find time to read to them the scriptures.

Invention requires both disciplines, strict common sense and wild imagination.