Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy.

...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.