The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It's useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Someone once asked me... whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: "Every day!"

It is not how much you are paid that matters. But how much you get done that is most important.

Other people's appetites easily appear excessive when one doesn't share them.

You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.

Success will come about because you are in a higher state of mind. If you create good karma, then you will go into higher states of mind.

There is pleasure in the pathless woods.

When I was young, I thought I was a god. Now, I just basically work on staying humble. My priorities changed. Just to be able to try to change them - that was frightening to me.

You either disrupt your own company or someone else will.

I shall confess at the outset that it was only shortly after the beginning of this century that I entered active life - with a somewhat precocious capacity for involvement.

Wilderness, like the national park system, was an American idea.