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

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.

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.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking “Is there a meaning to music?” My answer would be, “Yes”, And “Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?” My answer to that would be “No.”

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, “Is there a meaning to music?” My answer to that would be, “Yes.” And “Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?” My answer to that would be, “No.”

I hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

Arthur V. Berger commenting on the music of Aaron Copland: Here is at last an American that we may place unapologetically beside the great recognized creative figures of any other country.

Someone once asked me… whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: “Every day!”

I grew up eating hamburger helper, macaroni and cheese, and drinking lots of milk, and looked at lots of cows; but I feel like a New Yorker now, I’ve lived here for sixteen years.

There was a little element of feeling like a cow.

Studying cows, pigs and chickens can help an actor develop his character. There are a lot of things I learned from animals. One was that they couldn’t hiss or boo me.

Mathematicians, like cows in the dark, all look alike to me.

Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.

My cow is not pretty, but it is pretty to me.

What good is a cow that neither gives milk nor conceives? Similarly, what is the value of the birth of a son if he becomes neither learned nor a pure devotee of the Lord?

A household can never appear prosperous without a cow. How auspicious it is to wake up in the morning to the mooing of your own cow!