What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.

Art is not only about angst.

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

Someone who eats pancakes and jam can't be so awfully dangerous. You can talk to him.

Ultimately it all comes down to money, ultimately it all comes down to lab capacity. One thing we are clear about is if that money were to pass (in Congress), thousands of lives will be saved.

I love making art... It's largely how I see myself. I'm an artist; therefore I have to make art.

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.

When you've written a song, sometimes it's really hard to wrap your brain around what somebody else is doing, or maybe the way that they see the song.

Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.

Education is a lifelong journey whose destination expands as you travel.

Everything I say is true.

I was listening to Jimi Hendrix; I just admire his artistry and creativity as an artist.

Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention.