My music is best understood by children and animals.

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.

Families are so beautiful. Wherever we may be, looking at kids and happy families make us feel like home.

Our time is limited, so do not waste it living someone else’s life

After all, the more women are developed internally, the more this is threatening to a society that insists on seeing them merely externally.

...if you give respect, yet get respect back. If you offend, you get...retribution.

Eugene's got a fake ID, and he actually gets away with using it because he looks like he's thirty-six, thanks to his devotion to tasseled shoes and his ridiculous carpet of chest hair.

As proud as I am of Doo-Wops I feel like, 'Oh, man. People haven't seen nothing. They don't even know what I'm about to do,' and that's what I can't wait to show the world.

Habit is stronger than desire.

You never know, the way technology is going, we might all use the games for scouting by the time I retire.

Europe has become the first line of defense for the United States. It has become a training ground for terrorists.

When I was young, and I'd get A's, I'd get this good feeling of all the things that I could be. And then I'd never became any of them.