Without discipline, there can be no freedom.

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

It is nothing to succeed if one has not taken great trouble, and it is nothing to fail if one has done the best one could.

Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult.

The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.

Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so.

Do nothing for effect. Do it for truth.

Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.

False notes can be forgiven, false music cannot.

It doesn’t matter how bitter or better the past has been, what we can do with the bitter or better past today is what matters.

Prison is the only place, where Darwin's Theory of Evolution may seem to work. Survival of the fittest does only work, where the fittest is defined as the most loving.

It's amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write.

There was always an unspoken generosity about my mom.

You call that statesmanship. I call it an emotional spasm.

I just make music based on what I believe.

If you want to bring the people of this world together, you have to be willing to engage with countries that do not share our [western] democratic values.

Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long your values don't change.

There is a sort of economy in Providence that one shall excel where another is defective, in order to make men more useful to each other, and mix them in society.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.