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

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Life without music is unthinkable.

It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.

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

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.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

Nourish your soul, mediate daily.

Life is hard. Find some really good people to walk through it with. It makes things a little easier.

I exist as I am that is enough If no other in the world be aware I sit content And if each and all be aware I sit content.

But democracy isn't a state of perfection. It has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance.

Despite what The Wall Street Journal says, our awards are the best-kept secret in America, with the possible exception of what George W. Bush did in the '70s.

How joyously the young sea-mew Lay dreaming on the waters blue, Whereon our little bark had thrown A little shade, the only one; But shadows ever man pursue.

Religion is not only a part of education, an element of humanity, but the center of everything else, always the first and the ultimate, the absolutely original.

Where there's dope, there's hope!

The law don't like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.

There is a time and a place for creativity.