The performance of performance has developed to such an extent in recent years that it challenges the music itself and will soon threaten it with relegation.

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.

If one cannot see gravitation acting here, he has no soul.

As long as we have life, we keep love and hope alive.

One of the great things about anarchy is that it’s hard to get it organized.

Visit many good books, but live in the Bible.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: Is there someone new?

It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not, we cling to.'

When I first went public with my son Evan's story, I just planned to talk about the 'R' word - Recovery. But soon I was spending most my time talking about the 'V' word - vaccines.

Where there is no property there is no injustice.

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere.

This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here.