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.

In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.

I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.

I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm

You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.

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