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.

Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

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.

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

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

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