You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized

Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.

Please don't try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have -- I want it that way.

Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

I don't write music for sissy ears.

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.

But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?

Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?

For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles. He seemed no less engaging than Goethe's.

I've lived a phenomenal life, and there's more life in me, but I'm here, I'm not yesterday, but all those yesterday's brought me here. So I'm very comfortable with that.

I think that some of it is electoral - helping candidates that are willing to take dramatic actions, not just to say a few words about how climate change might be a problem.

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab.

Every god-man created his own god: and there is no worse enmity on earth than that between gods.

The ideas choose me, not the other way around.

My choices in films are spontaneous.

Someone's parents have been singing entirely the wrong sort of songs.

The great challenge for me is to be all things to all people; I want to be a great mother, and I want to feel good when I'm at work.

Although we are being presented in Carnegie Hall, we have to furnish a budget for our guest stars, and for the music writing - which is a huge budget in any orchestra that plays popular music.