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

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.

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.

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.

Behind the proscenium arch, you can’t always hear what people in the audience are saying.

After the band loaded in and the curtain opened, we realized there was exactly one paying customer in the audience.

When you’re doing stand-up, you achieve an intimacy with the audience you can’t get on TV. There’s not a better feeling in the entire world then when you look out and see the audience is identifying with you.

I’ve always been lucky enough to have great audiences. It has been quite a life.

Maybe the actors that used to turn down William Goldman’s scripts – where he wanted them to stretch and grow, and he was mad at ’em, and said, “Why won’t they be a real actor?” – maybe they just knew their audience. It’s too bad.

Drawing is the most inalienable medium. It is private; it practically doesn’t have an audience in mind, just the artist’s expression.

Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.

The American audience, having been exposed to a narrowing range of ideas over the decades, often assumes that what they see and hear in the major media is all there is.