The story of Willie Stark fascinated me because it was tackling the story of a man who outwardly has all the success one could possibly want and who is destroyed by his personal demons.

It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.

We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them.

Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them.

I found a certain kind of music congenial to me; it never occurred to me to write music that was academically acceptable.

Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.

If something is successful with the audience, it's automatically suspect; the reverse is to say that not to reach audiences is the greatest compliment an artist can receive!

There is something inherent in our democracy that tends to want to level. America is a little uncomfortable in the presence of someone who is distinctly superior in whatever way.

What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds.

If an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they'll respond to it.

I find it enormously valuable to be sure that that the pacing is what I think it is and that the scenes have the shape I think they have musically and dramatically.

He gave everything to everybody. Except to me.

It was pleasant to think that men still sang, even in the midst of butchery and famine.

No evil ever came from a woman’s womb that wasn’t placed there first by a man.’... Tantie Neptune, Lucifer's Key by Charles A. Cornell, due 2013

I love working with kids and I want to just be able to do it from my heart and not as a job.

Contentment comes not so much from great wealth as from few wants.

It's about women. It's about power and it's about women and you just hate those two words in the same sentence, don't you?

The virtue of Yankee upbringing spiritually speaking is of more downright value to me than any past heritages.

I feel the closest to crazy when I'm disagreeing with the voice in my head

I do accents. Sometimes when I've had a few drinks, I speak in different accents all night long, and then at the end of an evening someone will say to me, 'Seriously, where are you from?'

If you put a s infront of hitman, you have my exact thoughts on Bret Hart