The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.

The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough.

It looks wrong, and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

Love is it's own protection.

...it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.

Insight involves trust - trusting that the information coming through is correct.

In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy.

Not to be miserable is all some people are capable of.

I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying.

Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour," she'd ask us, "when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?

Now a movie goes out to two, three thousand theaters and by Friday night at 10 o'clock they know if you are in or out. That desperate competition is, I think, horrendous. It's awful.

Never confine your best work, your hopes, your dreams, the aspiration of the American people to what will be signed by George W. Bush because that is too limiting a factor.

Each time I play a song it seems more real.