“I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received.”

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

Composition is selective improvisation.

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.

Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.

Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy. My music is best understood by children and animals.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa Lobos?

A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.

Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.

Composition is frozen improvisation.

I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk!

To continue in one path is to go backward.

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

My whole artistic life has always been about change, change, change, move on, move on. It’s the only thing I find interesting.

I don’t think there’s ever been a moment in history where that, as an artistic message, has played very well, because people in their hearts know that’s terrible and a lie.

In general, people like that are going to be more progressive, more open minded, a little more altruistic.

I liked radio, or podcasting. I like talking minus the camera and the script part. All those mediums are different, and they are all different with their pluses and minuses.

An hour or two of learning from the masters is usually enough to recharge my artistic batteries.

Until the past ten years, many defined the period primarily by its well-known literary, musical, and artistic elements while overlooking the fact there was any political component to it at all.

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won’t know what it is until I succeed in doing it.