I hope my recordings of my own works won't inhibit other people's performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn't always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

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.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Samuel finally understood the sound of the wind after all these years: The winds were a chorus of the prairie’s ever-present heartaches.

It ain't locked, till it's checked!

Christ has made my soul beautiful with the jewels of grace and virtue.

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

I feel like I was born and bred to stay self-motivated. I'm not one of those people who ho-hums and feels sorry for himself when something's bad.

When all your energy gone! When you have nothing left! That's when it's show time!

If your past is limited, your future is boundless.

The literature of a people must so ring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty.

I don't know why people think I'm polished - I often leave the house with buttons missing and ladders in my tights.