“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc.

We mortals are composed of two great schools Enlightened knaves or else religious fools.

It may be observed of good writing, as of good blood, that it is much easier to say what it is composed of than to compose it.

Billy Joel is an incredible musician. He just feels like one of the guys, you know. I grew up listening to his music.

Human beings, in a sense, may be thought of as multidimensional creatures composed of such poetic considerations as the individual need for self-realization, subdued passions for overwhelming beauty,

And a hunger for meaning beyond the flavors that enter and exit the physical body. A person might even be described as a self-contained multiverse.

I don’t compose. I assemble materials.

Composers combine notes, that’s all.