Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.

If idioms are more to be born than to be selected, then the things of life and human nature that a man has grown up with--(not that one man's experience is better than another's, but that it is 'his.')--may give him something better in his substance and manner than an over-long period of superimposed idiomatic education which quite likely doesn't fit his constitution. My father used to say, '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'

One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was, first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife

In 'thinking up' music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.

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

Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.

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