Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one's head, and finds it still there on waking up the next morning.

If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.

I find above all that the expression, atonal music, is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying the art of not falling, or swimming the art of not drowning.

My music is not modern, it is merely badly played

My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers.

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.

Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears.

You cannot expect the Form before the Idea,For they will come into being together.

My music is not lovely.

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.

I’m thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.

It is terribly amusing how many different climates of feelings one can go through in one day.

I went from 220 pounds that I cut down for 'Moneyball' to almost 270-280 pounds for 'Ten Year.'

We are not made for ourselves alone, we are made for the good of all our fellow creatures.

Color deceives continuously.

Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair or triplet of essential images.

I like to read in the dark. I like to go into the bathtub, turn out all the lights, and in the dark, read my books.

But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation.

The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.