I hate you, Richard Wagner . . . but I hate you on my knees.

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.

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

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

This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.

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

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