From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.

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

You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.

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

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.

What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.

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