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

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.

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.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

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

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

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.