Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.

To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

Life without music is unthinkable.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series.

What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.