“I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.”

Everything takes time… and that’s something that your generation find it a lot harder to adjust to.

You only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.

Sometimes life is a series of obstacles, a matter of putting one foot in front of the other.

if you had your mother at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.

Nobody fights you like your own sister; nobody else knows the most vulnerable parts of you and will aim for them without mercy.

The only thing Jess really cared about were those two children and letting them know they were okay. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you,

…I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn’t have met, and who didn’t like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other.

A man who has always loved you and, to his detriment, suspects he always will.

Some mistakes… Just have greater consequences than others. But you don’t have to let the result of one mistake be the thing that defines you.

You’ve done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?”

There is a hunger in you. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do.

Oh, Clark,if you had any idea what I want to do to you right now.And I…i can’t live with that knowledge. I can’t. It’s Not who I am. I can’t be the kind of man who just…accepts.

And it was suddenly very simple: There was no choice.

But don’t blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she’s still experimenting.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life–or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else’s life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window.

Do I do this to you?, he wondered, as he watched her eat. Or is this just the relief of being out from under the forbidden eye of that husband of yours?

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression.

The model of a composer.

I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

For my qualifying concert, Helmut Walcha would not coach Charles-Marie Widor or any American compositions. In his defense, his forte was Germanic composers, and his forte was really a fortissimo!

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

I have written six symphonies, they are smaller-scale works. I seem to emit my themes, work them out, combine and intertwine them, and then come to a close. I usually feel that there are no superfluous extras, but probably most composers feel that way about their works.

The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.

Men have been in the forefront of music for centuries, and they have written glorious music, loved and appreciated by many. In some ways, men are still in the forefront. There is a lot of room for composers of all types of music by both men and women, nowadays.