Music is given to us specifically to make order of things to move from an anarchic individualistic state to a regulated perfectly concious one which alone insures vitality and durability.

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.

When efforts that are wisely executed, the situation and condition don't affect the performance.

I think we d like life to be like a train..but it turns out to be a sailboat.

Just think: what if you could just, just blink yourself away?

I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.

Right here, right now, God has placed you to do what you do best. Go all the way.

I've lived, laughed, lost, and loved again the whole Shakespearian thing.

No man ever wrote more eloquently and luminously [than Heraclitus].

No one should ever imitate the style of another because, with regard to art, he will be called a nephew and not a child of nature.

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!