What we have to get clear to kids is that when you offer your stillness and open yourself to the experience of music, it pays you back more than you give.

I am not a long-run actor. I admire actors who can do that.

I'd forgotten I'd done the anime called Spirited Away, the English version of a Japanese film.

High school music teachers... nobody makes a living off it.

Very often when I go in to meet for movies or pilots, I'm put on videotape. I hate the notion that that tape is going to sit on a shelf and never get better.

Kids now are so used to surround sound and the power in theater speakers, that the concert hall is a disappointment to them.

I've played Lear three times, I would love to do it again.

Something happens to us all when we experience something as a unit that doesn't occur when we're on our couches or holding our little portable DVD players.

Every time I hear, Cut. Print, something cold and electrical goes off in my head, because I'm never going to change that film.

It's rare to be treated like a friend you haven't met in a Hollywood meeting.

It's really important to stay engaged and involved in the character.

You hear the same work by different orchestras, different conductors, violinists, pianists, singers, and slowly, the work reveals itself and begins to live deeper in you.

I will never master this craft. Orchestras are very, very forthcoming with me.

If it's right and true, it's listened to and accommodated.

Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten.

Because I don't take money, I'll go anywhere and do a benefit concert with almost any orchestra.

People are nice enough, but you can hear the giant tick of the second hand. People are so harried.

I love pulling people into concert halls who might not otherwise go and getting their ears tuned.

What we have to get clear to kids is that when you offer your stillness and open yourself to the experience of music, it pays you back more than you give.

A lot affects the outcome. It boils down to scheduling and the commitment of the network.

Very often, I don't make it through moments of recording because it is genuinely funny and absolutely ridiculous that a 60-year-old grown man is making these noises.

My father, who died a few years ago, was a good, simple, very honest man. His faith and affection for his family was just unassailable, without question.

Writing is hard work. Generating stories that catch people's attention and holding it are very difficult.

I had a meeting in LA in which they took a really overstuffed hour and a half. It was as close to old Hollywood as I remembered it in the last 20 years.

We lament the speed of our society and the lack of depth and the nature of disposable information.

There are a couple of roles I haven't played that I want to. I would love to play Shiloh.

I am certainly not a mainstream religious man.

In television you go in with this operating system that it is a crapshoot.

When something really extreme happens, you have to find a way to embrace that and include it in how you think about the character. Sometimes it's not easy.

Fun can happen on the interior. Nobody knows about it, but there are fireworks going on inside your spirit when you hear a great orchestra playing great music.

The ebulliently sharp mind of 'White Christmas' director Walter Bobbie made me tremble and strive in the same breath. The deceptively 'simple' dialogue of David Ives, asking every actor to just. say. it. Float it on the breeze; it doesn't need 'explanation,' just energy and truth.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.