“A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.”

The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

The melody is generally what the piece is all about.

When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.

I don’t compose. I assemble materials.

You may feel depressed, but it can’t be so depressing that you can’t move. No, I would say that people create in moments when they are elated about expressing their depression!

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

I adore extravagance but I abhor waste.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer – a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.

It spills from my fingers faster than ink can flow – feelings too strong to contain, emotions that demand to be felt.

Innate must flow fully, freely, naturally; to, through, and into the educated brain to produce what education calls greatness.

The rivers of blood are flowing beneath our feet… Ive been to hell, young man, youve only read about it.

River is time in water; as it came, still so it flows, yet never is the same.

Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will.

My aura is psychedelic, flow non-prehistoric metamorphic boric like acid no hat tricks a classic so park that ass like Jurassic

In the ’60s not everybody was wearing flowers in their hair and flowing caftans.