The best way to investigate the elusive phenomenon called the creative process may well be to target all the misconceptions, to explain what the creative process is not.

It is obvious that anything a scientist discovers or invents is based on previous discoveries and inventions. The same applies to the arts.

Why do we pigeonhole and label an artist? It is a sure way of missing the important, the contradictory, the things that make him or her unique.

Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist.

It is the element I miss in electronic music - no performance, no loving immersion. Maybe that is why I was never particularly drawn to electronic music.

Great music does not just make me feel good. It means something. It makes us understand. It makes us happy.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own.

There is another interesting paradox here: by immersing ourselves in what we love, we find ourselves. We do not lose ourselves. One does not lose one's identity by falling in love.

Any creator owes a debt to past creation.

The fact that Stravinsky used the classics as a major influence is obvious. What is interesting is how he used them, how he turned Bach into Stravinsky.

With true friends . . . even water drunk together is sweet enough.

If you are a girl dressing up in the morning thinking about the whole world having a point of view on what you are wearing, it takes the pleasure out of getting dressed.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Upon the present occasion London was full of clergymen. The specially clerical clubs, the Oxford and Cambridge, the Old University, and the Athenaeum, were black with them.

The world starts with a Big Bang and finishes with a human-made atomic Big Bang!

God, the Master Weaver. He stretches the yarn and intertwines the colors, the ragged twine with the velvet strings, the pains with the pleasures. Nothing escapes his reach.

I believe in past lives but I know nothing about mine and I don't want to know. I live in the present, taking one day at a time.

Strike as much and as hard as you please, only don't do it in the dark so that I cannot know who is my enemy.

The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible