The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.

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 am for freedom of religion and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.

Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds - promising untold opportunities - beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without.

Maybe he was a good a good whitecoat—like Jeb. And maybe the moon was made of cream cheese.

I look at someone like Kathryn Bigelow, and I have so much admiration. She's playing in the boy's sandpit, and winning.

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

Two very simple rules: A. You don't have to write. B. You can't do anything else The rest comes of itself.

Ask a glass of water why it pities the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.

Form no covetous desire, so that the demon of greediness may not deceive thee, and the treasure of the world may not be tasteless to thee.