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

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

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

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.

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