Time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Music and love are the wings of the soul.

Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love

It is not enough that the artist should be well prepared for the public. The public must be well prepared for what it is going to hear.

To render my works properly requires a combination of extreme precision and irresistible verve, a regulated vehemence, a dreamy tenderness, and an almost morbid melancholy.

The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings.

Only by pairing knowledge with inspiration will art evolve. Without these conditions any musician will remain a flawed artist, if one may speak of an artist at all.

Bach is Bach just as God is God.

You think that peace means that no one will fight. True peace is when you create peace within yourself leaving no one to fight.

...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

The reason why many people remain on the bottom is because they play to 'not lose', as opposed to playing to win at all costs.

The way that a handful of corporations in Los Angeles dictate how our stories are told creates a real poverty of imagination and it's a big problem.

The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.

The work is what it is and hopefully it's seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.

I am an avid supporter of PETA and all animals as well as animal rights programs.

A lie with a purpose is one of the worst kind, and the most profitable

I've had an interesting life.

I can't drink whiskey like I used to back then, that's for sure.