To me, the piano in itself is an orchestra.

If you take the creation of music and the creation of your own life values as your overall goal, then living becomes a musical process.

The quality of life, values that go down to doin' that, that's the issue.

Rhythm is the life of space of time danced through.

I discovered very early that it wasn't quite enough for me to imitate people.

I understand about the relative strengths of people, and I don't think people have to be anything. They can be nothin' if they want to be.

You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you're really interested in it.

To me, the piano in itself is an orchestra.

To feel is perhaps the most terrifying thing in this society.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

I do like to play people I wouldn't want to spend five minutes in a room with.

Form follows beauty.

The most special Slam is Wimbledon, of course. But where I feel the best is Melbourne. And you're happy that you're playing. When you get to the middle of the season, everything is week after week, and it's all routine. But when it's Melbourne in January, you are fresh and you want to play. It's nice.

I care about people, and I've learned in life that the only thing we are here for is to learn and teach.

When I was the captain of a ship I never failed to bring my ship to port and I won't fail to bring Romania to safe harbor. The belief that the president no longer represents the people is false.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

I went to a couple Academy Awards parties and I was definitely like, 'Whoa, no one will talk to me.'

When a poor person dies of hunger it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed.

Golf is like solitaire. When you cheat, you only cheat yourself.

I don't think music teaches about mundane, everyday life. It teaches us what it is to be a human being.

I'm not likely to be attracted to characters I've already done. I have to be almost frightened by the possibility of taking it on. Over the years, I realise I must enjoy walking that edge; I keep doing it.

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

To escape from the world means that ones mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world.

In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its 'measure.'

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

I've always liked clothes, since I was a kid.

Let us give publicity to HIV/AIDS and not hide it, because [that is] the only way to make it appear like a normal illness.

Why don't they go back to wood racquets? Then we would see the best tennis to be played.

Goals that are not written down are just wishes.

I was not born a size 2. I'm not skinny, period. I'm not willing to sleep with the director or step on somebody else's neck to get the job.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

The Greek conception of a life in harmony with nature found its most complete development in the rationalism of the Renaissance and of the centuries that followed it.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.