“The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.”

It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.

Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.

To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.

Silence, which will save from shame, will also deprive me of fame.

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

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.

I’ve got a nice collection of paintings – a Basquiat, a black-and-white Warhol that’s like a Rorschach test, and I commissioned Takashi Murakami to do a ten-foot joint for me. It’s almost like the explosion in Hiroshima with his famous skeleton head. There’s a wall above my fireplace reserved for it.

The negro has suffered far more from the commission of this crime against the women of his race by white men than the white race has ever suffered through his crimes.

I will accept no commission that would tend to create a rivalry with Grant.

I think that David Stern is probably the greatest commissioner that any sport has ever had in the history of this country.

The Glassco Commission was really not interested in good science. It was interested in good accounting.

As we’re on the verge of a major $1 billion boost in our annual cash flows that we expect to come from three major projects Geismar, Gulfstar and the Keathley Canyon Connector all of which have reached the commissioning stage here in the fourth quarter.

Work-get paid; don’t work-don’t get paid. Everybody is on commission.

The Great Commission is not an option to be considered; it is a command to be obeyed.