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

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

Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.

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

Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.

Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives.

Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff