The thing I learned from playing tennis is that I know what competition is. I can handle rejection.

You cannot do what I do for a living without having a thick skin.

Composers can do things that weren't allowed in the 17th century. Until we had composers like Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff to break the rules.

I have a huge record and cd collection of all kinds of great classical, jazz and all music but I find the internet very accessible and quick.

Sometimes it's very hard to turn off my brain especially when I have an eighteen hour day. I try to stop working by 10 or 11pm but you know sometimes there is nothing I can do about it.

There is competition. It's almost like I'm back in tennis competing in a way. There are usually about twenty composers vying for the number one spot for a big or medium film.

When I lost a tennis match that made me upset or hurt emotionally I would find myself going to the piano and playing for hours. It was my place of refuge and solace.

When you play competitive tennis you are competing against someone else and you have to win. Playing music I didn't have to win I had to become better within myself.

I was an accomplished junior tennis player up to around fourteen years old. At fourteen or fifteen I made the decision to venture off to make my life 100% music.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

There must be room in our world for eccentricity, even if it offends the prudes, and room for the vague other-worldliness that often goes with genius.

You know it's real when reality becomes a dream, the dream becomes real, and real feels unreal

It was the most perfect moment in my life.It was the last perfect moment in my life.

I already shred all my mail. What am I supposed to do now? Use pay phones? Smoke signals? Train pigeons? There's no such thing as privacy anymore.

As long as anger lives, it continues to be the fruitful parent of many unhappy children.

Any town that doesn't have sidewalks doesn't love its children.

We know what needs to be done - all that is missing is the will to do it.

I met my fathers in prison, they too a part of a scene; digging death.