The composer...joins Heaven and Earth with threads of sounds.

I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God.

My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound.

I found a greater identity with my own emotions in the Armenian culture as I grew older, as well as from the beginning, although I didn't know anything about it.

This is not to say that the Scots are not fine people, but they were all sort of... well, my grandfather was a minister and sort of Protestant, and this was rather depressing to me.

It's hard for me to think of others because I'm not particularly in sympathy with the music of this century.

I was born in Somerville, but I don't remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.

My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland.

To me, atonality is against nature. There is a center to everything that exists. The planets have the sun, the earth, the moon.

I did all kinds of things in order to earn a living.

The greater the emotional intensity, the greater the simplicity.

H is for Habit, winners make a habit of doing the things losers don't want to do.

I came. I saw the enormous possibilities and power of the human mind. It is the biggest plot of fertile land in the world. We just have to find the right see and the right technique of cultivation.

We sucked in atheism with our canned milk.

It is only through love that we can attain to communion with God. All living knowledge of God rests upon this foundation: that we experience him in our lives as Will-to-love.

Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.

The yawn of the void. A siren call for the unimaginative

The enlightenment experience is not what you think. How could it be anything that you can configure, anything you can imagine, any way that you think it should be?

The striking thing about America is - it's historically, extraordinary unusual, I don't of any other instance - is that productivity of workers and wages have not moved in tandem.

Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.

Focus is about saying, No. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.