I had all the normal interests - I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater.

There is something inherent in our democracy that tends to want to level. America is a little uncomfortable in the presence of someone who is distinctly superior in whatever way.

The artist is something of an outsider in America. I have always felt that America does not value its artists, certainly not in the sense that the Europeans do.

I find it enormously valuable to be sure that that the pacing is what I think it is and that the scenes have the shape I think they have musically and dramatically.

People in very high places suddenly fall, and we are always surprised because we don't factor in the basic element that they're humans and, therefore, they are flawed and have weaknesses.

Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them.

America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn't put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist.

Opera is given so little attention in the national press.

If I felt that one of my operas did not come off I would certainly say so.

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.

What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds.

I found a certain kind of music congenial to me; it never occurred to me to write music that was academically acceptable.

Anyone who creates something new or does something different artistically is going to be singled out.

I was interested in what was really going on in Salem at that time, and I resolved to investigate this seemingly unorthodox treatment of the people and the period.

The performances of my works in the last 10 years are probably equal to all the previous years put together. There are so many venues now and there is a completely new public for opera that's grown up outside of the traditional core opera public.

When I've seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can't tell you what that phenomenon is.

If an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they'll respond to it.

We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them.

If something is successful with the audience, it's automatically suspect; the reverse is to say that not to reach audiences is the greatest compliment an artist can receive!

You can't possibly predict what will last or not. But once you attempt to write for the ages, you're doomed.

I think anything that is expressed directly and as honestly as possible will last.

There's the Bacon society, which is fostered by his fourth wife Helen Bacon, but I don't know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music.

We don't have access to a national forum that we had in those days, through the news magazines which were the television news of the time. It's very disturbing to me that we've sort of been pushed to the corners.

Socially I never was an outsider. I have never thought of the conflict element before frankly, but perhaps it was wanting to belong, and at the same time wanting to retain one's own personality.

Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations.

I was encouraged by my mother and, to a lesser extent, by my father.

I had all the normal interests - I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater.

It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.

It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.

I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.

The story of Willie Stark fascinated me because it was tackling the story of a man who outwardly has all the success one could possibly want and who is destroyed by his personal demons.

Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.

Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps.

I've done a lot of basketball drills, not a whole lot of competitive stuff. I have basically been in the gym everyday working on my game, working on the time off that I've had from the game, just getting myself prepared mentally and physically for the season.

Basketball is in my blood. It is my obligation to try.

As I've said, basketball has been, I think, a real cooperative venture. There have been a lot of people that have been involved in it: coaches, administrators - not recently - fans and nobody, nobody any more so than students over the years.

It's very warm there, so we were outdoors all the time. The local people had programs for us year-round, where as kids we had the opportunity to play football, basketball, baseball, track and field - we just went from one sport to the next, year-round.

A basketball team is like the five fingers on your hand. If you can get them all together, you have a fist. That's how I want you to play.

I've tried to handle winning well, so that maybe we'll win again, but I've also tried to handle failure well. If those serve as good examples for teachers and kids, then I hope that would be a contribution I have made to sport. Not just basketball, but to sport.

My father was a soccer player. All my friends played basketball though, so I stuck with basketball.

Someday I might have to put down a basketball and have a regular 9-to-5 like everybody else.

I think we have our sports within our own culture that are huge with baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Those are the sports in America that we grow up with and soccer isn't really there yet.

If all I'm remembered for is being a good basketball player, then I've done a bad job with the rest of my life.

Both of us played basketball, and I played tennis and my knees are done. Now if you ask us head-to-head who wins at golf, I'm asking for a couple of strokes.

In the original script, my character was a basketball player rather than a boxer. I didn't think I could pull that off. I'm a little short to be a basketball player!

I like basketball, and I've been to three games, which is so much more fun than seeing it on TV, I think.

As all of us with any involvement in sports knows, no two umpires or no two referees have the same strike zone or call the same kind of a basketball game.

I wanted a NBA basketball gym at my house and that's what I worked hard for and I was able to achieve that.

Basketball is like war in that offensive weapons are developed first, and it always takes a while for the defense to catch up.