Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.

Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received.

As he farmed, hard labor left his hands callused, the sun bleached his hair, his face leathered, and his heart throbbed with music.

Scientists are in the strange position of being confronted daily by the indisputable fact of their own consciousness, yet with no way of explaining it.

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.

Love is responsible for nearly every kind of insanity in the world though greed, vanity, and pure meanness contribute their portion to general misery.

For five years we never went outside our doors without a volley of curses from our neighbours.

New tech almost always looks dumb right before it completely changes your life.

If we control the ball, they pay.

You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.

Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential.

A society of children first is a society that nurtures smiling faces in everyone.