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

I have two answers to everything and one answer to nothing.

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

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.

Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.

Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?

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.