Either your understanding of the meaning of music is there from the beginning or it is not.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

I'm a terrible singer, but it helps when I have to call a taxi.

I don't think events in your life affect your music.

My music is all about an idealistic human personality. I have 19th-century ideals.

If you have more money than you need, you have to give it away. It's a duty. I get to choose whom to sponsor, and I like to give to the areas that I know something about.

I want to make the world better.

Nicolette, Kendalle, and Alexandra are my children. Their mother, Cynthia Beck, and I, love them very much.

I see only adaptations - not revolutions.

My father was so much more than an accomplished businessman.

Both parents were very encouraging - especially my father. My father thought the sun rose and set with me. Neither one had a musical background or any musical talent. They liked classical music, but neither could carry a tune.

I do not think that music keeps evolving. It evolved through Bach; since then, in my humble opinion, all the innovations added nothing.

I've had every advantage in the world, despite the 18 years of silence which were nobody's fault but mine.

I've managed to dodge the curse. Not all my family have. Of course, music helped me - music is all about civilization, about something worthwhile. It's all about ideas.

The Getty family has been fully supportive throughout this situation, and for that, I am very grateful.

It's true that I tend to daydream. I'm the same person in business as I am in music: I can be distracted and absentminded. It's my style.

Either your understanding of the meaning of music is there from the beginning or it is not.

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 personally do not write highbrow music. If I do, it's by accident.

I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine.

There is no change - I'm as deep or as shallow as I ever was. What's new is on-the-job experience. This is what you gain with years.

I just have to take my chances like any other composer.

From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted.

Before beginning, plan carefully.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

The people who voted for President Obama are just beginning to wake up to exactly what they brought in. The 'change' they envisioned is not the 'change' they have gotten.

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

In the beginning it was all black and white.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

At the beginning of 1955 only about 60 percent of American homes had TVs.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Most musicians count at the beginning, and never count and talk to their musicians after that. They only talk to them at the end of the song. But I would count with them and talk.

What you really remember at the beginning was that you have to throw a budget together. We made some terrible mistakes at the beginning in my own budget that took us at least a year to catch up on.

There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens.

I am pleased to see that information campaigns, such as the America's WETLAND effort, are getting the message out, and people are beginning to realize that wetlands loss in Louisiana affects us all.

I started working on trying to sound like June from the very beginning.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.

Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.

I did all the work at the beginning up until the point where I couldn't handle the increasingly heavy art production burden alone. I needed, and got, assistance.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

You know, in the beginning when your first payroll comes up and you have to borrow money to meet the payroll, you lose sleep the night before, and you say to yourself real fast, 'Well, maybe I should keep working a couple more years. It's sobering.