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.

Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.

In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.

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

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

Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.

Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.