A melody is not merely something you can hum.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It's useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

Someone once asked me... whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: "Every day!"

All the world talks, knowledge or information, takes you nowhere unless it’s applied into life. It’s only the experience, which allows you to see, beyond the present state.

You can look for external sources of motivation and that can catalyze a change, but it won't sustain one. It has to be from an internal desire.

Martial arts, like any art, is an unrestricted athletic expression of an individual soul.

A beep on the nose is a sign of great affection.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

You really try to work the character out and spend time in the headspace of the character. That's what I did.

In this business, if you don't have the capacity to step back and have some sort of relativity about things, you're screwed.

Nobody cares if you can't dance well.

Business and leadership is about the future. What worked five years ago is unlikely to work tomorrow.

I've also got a kind of rule where if I don't write it down and I can still remember it it's worth remembering!