A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street any more without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

When I discovered that I had been made custodian of this gift, in my earliest childhood, I pledged myself to God to be worthy of it, but I have received uncovenanted mercies all my life. The custodian has too often kept faith on his all-too-worldly terms.

Composition is frozen improvisation.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.

My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?