Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity.

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind.

The language of music is common to all generations and nations; it is understood by everybody, since it is understood with the heart.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.

Beethoven I take twice a week, Haydn four times, and Mozart every day.

Music is a kind of harmonious language.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge.

Answer them critics with silence and indifference. It works better, I assure you, than anger and argument. . . .

Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair.

If Beethoven is a prodigy of man, Bach is a miracle of God.

I believe that to be kept from evil is better than to be healed from sickness.

There is one inevitable criterion of judgment touching religious faith ... Can you reduce it to practice? If not have none of it.

Anything?" She laughed. "Like what kind of anything did you want?" "Well, when I was five, I wanted to take a bath in spaghetti." -Clary & Jace, pg.310-

The traditional model we all grew up with is obsolete.

You have no control over how much talent you possess. You control only what you do with it.

Religion is never the problem; it's the people who use it to gain power.

He loves but lightly who his love can tell.

She put out her hand and touched his forearm, as she would have touched some piece of porcelain or sculpture, just for the sheer animal pleasure of feeling its shape and curve beneath her fingertips.

It's just really tragic after all the horrors of the last 1,000 years we can't leave behind something as primitive as government-sponsored execution.

Oh, pilot! 'tis a fearful night, There's danger on the deep.