“Composition is selective improvisation.”

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.

Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.

I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

Composers combine notes, that’s all.

Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.

Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.

The profound meaning of music’s essential aim, is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being.

I never understood the need for a “live” audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.

We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.

There are a number of teams that would become vastly improved with Drew Bledsoe.

Too often, players who are trying to improve their right hand dexterity get hung up by playing too many notes with the left hand.I hear a lot of players running whole scales from the sixth string to the first ,

When you get to play with the big boys, your game improves drastically.

The improvement of the mind improves the heart and corrects the understanding.

There are those… who enter the world in such poverty that they are deprived of both the means and the motivation to improve their lot.

I don’t think it’s necessarily the right way to go about it, because I think we need to really just improve our every moment and improve our quality of life.

We have to find ways to support creative people because the only way we are going to improve our laws… is by creating our way out of it.

Tonight Illinois has set a tone for the nation, that we won’t stand idle hoping that our economy improves.