“What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn’t laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in “serious” music.”

When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.

I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.

It’s about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.

He fell like a chicken into the soup.

Those who have ears to hear, will hear.

In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.

Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.

I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin’s orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death.

Every piece of music is a form of personal expression for its creator. If a work doesn’t express the composers own personal point of view, his own ideas, then it doesn’t, in my opinion, even deserve to be born.

I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible; and if I don’t succeed, I consider it my own fault.

A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.

I don’t know what will become of this piece. Our brave critics will no doubt charge me with imitating Ravel’s Bolero. Too bad – this is how I hear war.

A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed.

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!

I’m about a 20-handicapper with a guitar. I can only play three songs on my own album. I did the lyrics, not the music.

Only two to three per cent of an audience is interested in words and pays attention to lyrics.

Some songs are too repetitive for me to be able to fashion a humorous set of lyrics around. Some songs flat-out just don’t work creatively for me.

If it’s somebody else’s lyric, and the message is a little unusual for you, it requires that you learn that new message.

I’ve always felt that the game itself is pretty much a melody and I am there to provide the lyrics.

She [Whitney Houston] inherited gifts for skillfully interpreting lyrics and endowing them with new depth and jeweled nuance.

Since I was a kid, when I pick up my guitar it’s been hard for me to write some sort of bubblegum lyrics. It’s not really ever been my route.

I have a lot of questions and I don’t have that many answers. So what better place to exercise those thoughts than the lyrics, I guess.