You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

Art is not only about angst.

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

The book is man's best invention so far.

An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.

People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness.

The U.S. embargo imposed on Nicaragua, rather than weakening the Sandinistas, actually maintained them in power.

I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie.

If you were mine, I would never have broken up with you, not in a million years.

When I worked on Altar Boys, they wanted to see us having fun. The four of us would have fun on set and steal each other's lines, and mess with the director.

It's an honest place to be if you don't understand someone else's experience, but there's no way for the other to understand if a conversation or an explanation isn't made.

A digging fork is a stout, short-handled tool with four flat tines about a foot long.... for weeding I use it delicately to nudge the soil loose from roots without breaking them.

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web... Now even my cat has its own page.