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

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.

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

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.

I’ve never been one to look up the ladder. I’ve always looked down the ladder. As long as there’s one guy down there, I’m fine.

So fine that the Irish don’t even acknowledge that it exists.

Rain is also very difficult to film, particularly in Ireland because it’s quite fine.

That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.

Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.

Justice is such a fine thing that we cannot pay too dearly for it.

There are probably a few library fines I haven’t paid yet, but I’m a pretty clean-cut guy overall.

I believed there was enough evidence to go to trial. Grand jury said there wasn’t. Okay, fine. Do I have a right to disagree with the grand jury? Many Americans believe O.J. Simpson was guilty.