Silence, which will save from shame, will also deprive me of fame.

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.

During my school years, I was never a brilliant student, but just an average one, with only above average level of curiosity.

They Served...reliving memoriesthat will not diegiving their allfor you and I -friends takenlives shaken...

Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.

People didn't think animals thought or remembered or had minds! They most certainly do: any pet owner knows more than a lot of scientists about animals.

I always let the characters guide the stories. They really let me know what they want to say and what action they want to happen.

It is difficult to speak of what is common in a way of your own.

And if those children are unresponsive, maybe you can't teach them yet, but you can love them. And if you love them today, maybe you can teach them tomorrow.

To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up.

Thus all things altered. Nothing dies. And here and there the unbodied spirit flies.

You have to feel the bad to be able to feel the good.