There is no one part of the brain which recognizes or responds emotionally to music. Instead, there are many different parts responding to different aspects of music: to pitch, to frequency, to timbre, to tonal intervals, to consonance, to dissonance, to rhythm, to melodic contour, to harmony.

I suspect that music has qualities both of speech and writing - partly built in, partly individually constructed - and this goes on all through one's life.

Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement

Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers.

Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what "other" people have.

I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future; the freedom to get beyond ourselves...in states of mind that allow us to rise above our immediate surroundings and see the beauty and value of the world we live in.