Piano is very elegant. I also think it's a very truthful instrument.

Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.

You can find the whole world of a film in one instrument, or you can find a world of sound in the orchestra.

I have to feel something emotionally on the story to be able to write for it. I turn things down if I don't feel I'm really right to tell that particular story.

The art of making films is a collaborative art. As a composer, you're always working with the cinematographer because he's so much the heart of the world they've created on film.

Film music really is about point of view and you can shift it wherever you want really depending on how you look at it.

Sometimes you want to use the music in a clarity way to explain something in the film.

When you're working on a film, it's intense and it's very all-consuming. There's not something in particular.

Theater and film are essentially the same - just different kinds of storytelling.

I've been writing music since I was 9. I took harmony and counterpoint classes when I was studying the clarinet. So, I've been writing for an awfully long time. It just became part of everyday life.

I live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. and spend time in the West Village, where my wife Elizabeth Cotnoir, a writer-producer and documentary filmmaker, has an office.

The harder you work, the luckier you are, and I worked like hell.

By standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of another’s solitude, we may mediate the love of God to a person who needs something deeper than any human being can give.

Relationships are never complicated. You’re either together or you’re not. If someone says it’s complicated, it really just means someone’s killing time until something better comes along.

In great matters men show themselves as they wish to be seen in small matters as they are.

If we don't preserve the natural resources, you aren't going to have a sustainable society. This is not something for Chez Panisse and the elite of San Francisco. It's for everyone.

The idea that anyone would think their religious ideas make them morally superior is just preposterous.

Classic music will always come across better on the ice because skating has such a rich history, rooted in tradition.

You've got to go where the work is. My mom got a job somewhere else so I went and lived with her and then I just bounced all over going to school, chasing rainbows and all that.

I was having health issues all my life. You're just not conditioned to think of them as health issues.

Never turn your back on reality. It surrounds you.