“My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.”

I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

Composers combine notes, that’s all.

Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.

Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.

The profound meaning of music’s essential aim, is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being.

I never understood the need for a “live” audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.

We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

I am an inventor of music.

Let’s get drunk off the stars and tell each other everything we’re afraid to say sober.

Your story isn’t powerful enough if all it does is lead the horse to water; it has to inspire the horse to drink, too. On social media, the only story that can achieve that goal is one told with native content.

I hope next time when we meet, we won’t be fighting each other. Instead we will be drinking tea together.

I still drink vodka; I’m not an advocate of drinking, but I’m no angel. I don’t like grass, because it just makes me hungry.

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.

If I had not some strength of will I would make a first class drunkard.

China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country but we turned them into coffee drinkers.

Yellow is evil, so don’t drink your piss.