To continue in one path is to go backward.

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.

God has a plan for you but He does not plan for you

When a man offers you his soul, do you give him change?

Borders are scratched across the hearts of men By strangers with a calm, judicial pen, And when the borders bleed we watch with dread The lines of ink across the map turn red.

Whatever will happen will happen.

The successful leader must be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes and the shortcomings of his followers.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I was constantly with my headphones, just making music all the time. People were calling me a "musician", and I found that so weird.

Have you ever heard sculptors say that they don’t actually sculpt an object; they sculpt away everything that isn’t the object?

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages.

I want to get back to my foundation. And my foundation was my mechanics and the way I repeat them in such a dynamic way.