“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!”

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.

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!”

There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

The parity of women’s health. It’s very depressing to think that you win these rights, but then you have to win them again, and again, and again, and fight the same battles over and over.

One of the most depressing features of the ethical side of the matter is that instead of such methods arousing contempt they are more or less openly admired. And this is logical.

I’ve been anxious but not depressed. I’m an incorrigible optimist.

Everyone gets depressed. But what do you do? You just go through it.

Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.

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

I’d been depressed before, of course. But I’m talking about really depressed. Not just feeling a bit down or sad, a depression that has something to do with biorhythms. I’m talking about the kind of depressed that floats in upon you like a fog.