Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

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've made mistakes before of doing different projects just based on my dreams, my hopes, my thing, and not really thinking about my customers.

I certainly think that when I flick through all the magazines at the hairdresser's I like to see and am drawn to images that have an intelligence and mind at work behind them.

The mob's not coming back in the Teamsters Union. We've gotten rid of them, and we're free to be free of government supervision.

I won't make shorthand films, because I don't want to manipulate audiences into assuming quick, manufactured truths.

Come along inside... We'll see if tea and buns can make the world a better place.

We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.

Love is an irreresisistible desire to be irresistibily desired.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

Knowledge is immensely powerful and immensely useful.

I was very, very shy when I was little. Acting lets you access all those different parts of yourself to make the character authentic.