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

I believe in people. I feel, love, need and respect people above all else, including natural scenery, organized piety and nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of a mountain can make the mountain disappear for me, one person fighting for truth can disqualify for me the entire system which had dispensed it.

It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.

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

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

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

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