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

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.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

I've always believed the greater danger is not aiming too high, but too low, settling for a bogey rather than shooting for an eagle.

You go through phases. You have to reinvent reasons for playing, and one year's answer might not do for another.

Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.

My first year and a half in Hollywood, I did three films. Then in 1959, I was in 'Gidget,' 'Imitation of Life' and 'A Summer Place.' After that, I was a star. It was fun.

There is some level on which this life must occasionally become repugnant and unappetizing to you and you must step back from it. And then you have a new relationship with it, and then you step back into it from a different angle - with a new appetite - and then you find the next leg of your journey.

Under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations, emails, relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and tweets and tags, we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place: ourselves.

Around 1930, a small new phenomenon arose in Depression-ridden America, spawned out of the letter columns in science fiction magazines: fandom.

Were all entitled to our superstitions.

If the United States were to cut and run from Iraq, we would send a message of weakness that would embolden our terrorist enemies across the globe. A failed Iraq would destabilize the entire region and undermine U.S. national security for decades to come.

You have to feel good in what you're wearing; if you don't feel good it's not going to look good. You ever see someone wear something that's crazy and say, 'That's so crazy!' But they look good in it, because they feel good in it - you can just tell.

Common aim is stronger than blood.

When I go there to Afghanistan or Pakistan, the question both asked - and if it's not asked, implied - is, 'Are you staying this time?' because we left last time, in 1989 in Afghanistan, and we sanctioned Pakistan from 1990 to 2002. So I think it's a fair question.

If at the end of the day, people look at it and say, oh, yeah, I liked his stuff, or for the most part I liked his stuff, or I've enjoyed watching some of the things he's done, that's all I can hope for.

Mom thinks I live in this dream world where everybody's Ivana Trump.

I've been a printmaker and designed objects. I've done 500 posters.

It's a never ending battle of making your cars better and also trying to be better yourself.

A huge amount of our everyday thinking - powerful, creative, and resonant stuff - is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us.

The celebration... you cannot practice it or anything. It's a moment when the excitement of your goal make you react to the moment.

Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.

Success is not a sometimes thing. In other words you dont do what is right once in awhile but all the time. Success is a habit. Winning is a habit.

Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.

It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.

I have an overactive sense of justice. I want women to realize you don't have to work for the company. You can run the company. I want the scope for them to be endless.