The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is.

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.

When it's all said and done, I hope to die with a smile on my face.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

Passion is what gives sense to our life.

Do whatever you have to do to be happy.

The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer. The world must be saved from its saviors. If the friends of liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop the remedies!

I'm very close to my family. Not like these big stars - not mentioning any names - who lose the plot and don't know who they are.

Everything I do in my life is very aggressive.

Teaching children to read was one thing; keeping them interested in reading was something else.

True happiness is not made in getting something. True happiness is becoming something. This can be done by being committed to lofty goals. We cannot become something without commitment.

My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.