My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.

Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there's more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you're bankrupt.

Being an old radical, I like films like Spartacus. I could relate to the hero.

I prefer to write music for family films. I like people.

When I decided to go to a country that subsidized music, I went to the Soviet Union for two years.

If dogs could talk it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.

If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder. "I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest.

You have this way of making me feel like I can fly.

Failure is not getting beat. Failure is when you don't do a good job preparing.

Be silent and safe-silence never betrays you.

The fraudster's greatest liability is the certainty that the fraud is too clever to be detected.

It's one of the reasons I don't do drugs. One sniff and I'd go all the way.

The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.

A man's perfection is his work.

There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.