“Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.”

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.

Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.

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.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

By the time I got writing ‘Halcyon,’ I was on a roll, and I realized I had so much to write about, I realized I had so much built up inside that I couldn’t really alleviate before, and then all of a sudden it was like reservoir burst.

I used to have a little whisky before I went on stage. I realized that could have slowly turned into something a bit more serious. I get hyped up. I also think doing it a lot, you get used to it. You get more confidence. It’s confidence building, really.

People may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they’ll join your side.

I’ve come to the realisation that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing half the time.

But when we came out of camp, that’s when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.

Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.

There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.