I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

Art is not only about angst.

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

The truth is, most people who do what you'd call 'wrong' do it for what they call 'right' reasons.

I am stuck in traffic in a taxicabwhich is typicaland not just of modern life

Go see it and see for yourself why you shouldn't go see it.

We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

One must be able to say at all times--instead of points, straight lines, and planes--tables, chairs, and beer mugs

While tenderness of feeling and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of temperament, goodness is an achievement of the will and a quality of the life.

What brings people down is the same thing over and over.

Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer.

Every day of the year is a good day to think more deeply about Good Friday, for Good Friday is the drama of the love by which our every day is sustained.

We do not possess an 'ego.' We are possessed by the idea of one.