Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It's useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Someone once asked me... whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: "Every day!"

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

I recall my dad saying about me once that the only time he'd ever heard me say 'never' was when I was asked if I'd had enough.

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

If people say that here and there someone has been taken away and maltreated, I can only reply: You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

To be honest, I wrote so many drafts of this book [ The Nightingale ] and changed the characters so many times; the real surprise is that I finished the book at all.

To engage in any activity, the warrior needs to know what to expect, how to achieve the objective and whether or not he is capable of carrying out the proposed task.

The Self is the one Reality that always exists, and it is by the light of the Self that all other things are seen.

[James] Baldwin "was one of greatest intellectuals of his time. He was an important voice, period, not an important black voice."

Nature has her proper interest; and he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that every Thing has a Life of its own, and that we are all one Life.

Denzel has been that leading man, but it took him a while to get to Training Day and Hurricane Carter.