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

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.

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

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.

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.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.