“I’ve always regarded nature as the clothing of God.”

To me, atonality is against nature. There is a center to everything that exists.

I found a greater identity with my own emotions in the Armenian culture as I grew older.

As well as from the beginning, although I didn’t know anything about it.

It’s hard for me to think of others because I’m not particularly in sympathy with the music of this century.

Well, my grandfather was a minister and sort of Protestant, and this was rather depressing to me.

My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing.

The greater the emotional intensity, the greater the simplicity.

I was born in Somerville, but I don’t remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.

The composer…joins Heaven and Earth with threads of sounds.

She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland.

There is nothing like practice.

The planets have the sun, the earth, the moon.

I did all kinds of things in order to earn a living.

I was much more interested in the orchestra than the piano.

My mother’s background was Scottish.

This is not to say that the Scots are not fine people, but they were all sort of.

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

Yeah, at first people were talking about me. But now everyone is wearing their clothes more fitted.

I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer.

When I entered high school I was an A-student, but not for long. I wanted the fancy clothes. I wanted to hang out with the guys. I went from being an A-student to a B-student to a C-student, but I didn’t care. I was getting the high fives and the low fives and the pats on the back. I was cool.

I’m just showing my personality in my clothing.

The clothes are not making me If I like it, that’s all that mattersIt’s not about the clothes. It’s about how I am as a person and how confident I am.

Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.