“The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.”

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

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.

I’ll eat anything. I love food in general. I love traditional Mexican, carne asada. Just meat, beans, rice, and some good salsa.

The news media in general are liberal. If you want to be a reporter, you are going to see poverty and misery, and you have to be involved in the human condition.

Women, in general, are not part of the corruption of the past, so they can give a new kind of leadership, a new image for mankind.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

There need to be more women supporting women. Not just in fashion, in general.

No government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal.

Consumerism diverts us from thinking about women’s rights, it stops us from thinking about Iraq, it stops us from thinking about what’s going on in Africa – it stops us from thinking in general.

Everything that is hard to attain is easily assailed by the generality of men.