Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.

Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received.

I would rather be kind than wise.

Don't seek the truth; just drop your opinions.

I'm OK being the veteran, but I'm still just a kid.

I think pressure is a good thing and it's good to be able to feel it and use it and experience the feeling of it and especially if you can get past it.

I was almost impeached for getting cars off sidewalks which car owning upper classes had illegally appropriated for parking.

I was no party man myself, and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them.

If you get outside the world of show business and its satellites, there's a whole world of car nuts in the Los Angeles area.

But years hath done this wrong, To make me write too much, and live too long.

Do good, be good and see good. Do everything with love.

I don't know how you can do it, if you don't recognition the media as a power center in America.