“Composing is like driving down a foggy road.”

One day I’ll be able to relax a bit, and try and become a good composer.

These two are not two, love has made them one. Amo Ergo Sum! And by its mystery each is no less but more.

Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.

The model of a composer.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.

I liked the opera very much. Everything but the music.

The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.

I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like.

Music does not excite until it is performed.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful.

I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

The general public will almost always stand behind the traditionalists. In the public eye, architecture is about comfort, about shelter, about bricks and mortar.

What the heck do you think I’m doing? I’m laying these darn bricks! He then walked over to the second bricklayer and asked the same question.

Brick and mortar businesses – and the communities that depend on them – cannot continue to bear an unfair sales tax burden from which their on-line competitors are effectively exempt.

Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.

I could break bricks with my hands when I was 12.