Truth is a big concept.

It is obvious that anything a scientist discovers or invents is based on previous discoveries and inventions. The same applies to the arts.

Why do we pigeonhole and label an artist? It is a sure way of missing the important, the contradictory, the things that make him or her unique.

Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist.

It is the element I miss in electronic music - no performance, no loving immersion. Maybe that is why I was never particularly drawn to electronic music.

Great music does not just make me feel good. It means something. It makes us understand. It makes us happy.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own.

There is another interesting paradox here: by immersing ourselves in what we love, we find ourselves. We do not lose ourselves. One does not lose one's identity by falling in love.

Any creator owes a debt to past creation.

The fact that Stravinsky used the classics as a major influence is obvious. What is interesting is how he used them, how he turned Bach into Stravinsky.

Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?

The species and the genus are always the work of nature [i.e. specially created]; the variety mostly that of circumstance; the class and the order are the work of nature and art.

Before a brain can register a thought, a mind must think it... every step of the way is mind over matter... We override our brains all the time.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

We are not committed to this or that. We are committed to the nothing in-between, whether we know it or not.

Sometimes I'll flip through a magazine and do a double take when I see myself in it, it's just crazy!

Pain is inevitable, it eventually touches us all. Suffering is optional.

It's still pretty surreal. I wake up every day and just pinch myself and kind of think about how far I've come and all the stuff I have done.

I prefer liquor store robbers with hungry kids to companies that locate offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.

You gotta have goals!