I don't hate work, composing is not work for me, it's my pleasure; it's my life. So why should I stop? If something is pleasurable and exciting and rewarding, why should one stop?

And it is this sense that some of us have to contribute to the culture, to the society in ways that may hurt financially, so what? We do it because we are born to do it, we feel we have no other choice and so be it.

I would like to read some books: I don't have time; I would like to continue working on my autobiography.

So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things together in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty musicians to do this it was something extraordinary.

But somehow, I felt no inclination to be interested in it in any amateur way, let alone professional, until suddenly I became interested. And the first thing I did was to compose: not play an instrument, but to compose.

As long as I'm healthy and can keep going that's what I'll do.

The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!

After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

I don't hate work, composing is not work for me, it's my pleasure; it's my life. So why should I stop? If something is pleasurable and exciting and rewarding, why should one stop?

Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations.

That was more or less coincidental in the sense that my parents wanted me to come back to New York because that's the center of musical activity still to this day, more or less, and so I auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera.

You know, I'm not gonna take my money with me to heaven or hell, wherever I'm going. So I want to do something good with it even though my means are very limited. I'm no millionaire!

As rich as Cincinnati was in live music, New York was even more.

So this anchoring in some way, in some important way in the past without repeating the past, but on the basis of the past building something new: that is what is important.

Well, because music is my life and music is not work for me.

I hate wasting people's time.

I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

You either love or you hate. You live in the middle, you get nothing.

I used to smoke two packs a day and I just hate being a nonsmoker... but I will never consider myself a nonsmoker because I always find smokers the most interesting people at the table.

I hate the crazy, neurotic characters beyond a certain point.

I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.

In the past I've made movies that were pretty universally liked. You can't really hate them. You can discard them, but you can't really hate them.

In a war, you must hate somebody or love somebody; you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on.

Listen kid, take my advice, never hate a song that has sold half a million copies.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

I hate leaving home. I love what I do, but I'd love to go home every night.

I hate it when people talk about Buffy as being campy... I hate camp, I don't enjoy dumb TV. I believe Aaron Spelling has single-handedly lowered SAT scores.

When people say 'love to hate', they actually mean 'love to be appalled by' - if they truly hated them, they'd never repeat a catch phrase.

I hate getting bored.

Don't hate the media, become the media.

The middlebrow, I hate.

If a university official's letter accusing a speaker of having a proclivity to commit speech crimes before she's given the speech - which then leads to Facebook postings demanding that Ann Coulter be hurt, a massive riot and a police-ordered cancellation of the speech - is not hate speech, then there is no such thing as hate speech.

We must make it clear that a platform of 'I hate gay men and women' is not a way to become president of the United States.

I'm like an old dog, I hate to be run off from home.

You've got to be taught to hate and fear.

Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind - listen to the birds. And don't hate nobody.

Don't hate the word, playa; hate the dictionary.

Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion... the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

I hate artists who are not of their time.

You don't only worry about the people who hate or resent you; in a way, you're more worried about the people who love you.

Because I hate fake people and I always think I'm never fake.

Fish sticks and beef stew that millions of children love to hate.

Those are serious questions of war and peace, of freedom or tyranny, whether or not there is ever going to be a hope of us instilling some democratic systems in a part of the world that frankly is breeding hate and destruction directed right at us.

Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren't proper words for communicating what should be done with it.

Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you desire from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out.

It is right to hate sin, but not to hate the sinner.

I don't like to produce albums. I hate producing albums, as a matter of fact, because I'm an obsessed mixer and I can't leave it alone.