However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

Well I live in Vienna with my wife and son, and I teach in Hamburg, there will be no changes in that respect.

In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.

I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.

I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which isolated the Jewish culture.

However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

It isn't false modesty when I say this, but although I am supposed to be a famous person it doesn't mean anything to me. I just sit at home and work.

I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.

I studied music at the most remedial level when I was a kid, through the Los Angeles public schools, with a little private instruction.

The best films come about through experimentation.

If we do not want to be pained by anybody we must not pain anybody; and how can man consider himself humane if he wants to live at the cost of others.

Attention is the fundamental instrument we use for learning, thinking, communicating, deciding, yet neither parents nor schools spend any time helping young people learn how to manage information streams and control the ways they deploy their attention.

The most certain thing you can say about the environment tomorrow is that it probably is going to be just like today, for the most part.

I couldn't get along with the French.

It's interesting to play a role where you don't really have to preoccupy yourself with any need to convince yourself that you're not acting.

Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.

Good, better, best. Never let it rest. Until your good is better and your better is best.

Equanimity is power.

Many chefs are either technically or artistically better than me, but I know my food has soul.

Running has never failed to give me great end results, and that's why I keep coming back for more!

From a distance, at a time of urbanization and connectivity, rodeo and ranching may seem anachronistic notions - quaint and sepia-toned from an America that no longer exists.

I think for most people it's hard to understand what it is about swimming - I mean it's such a solo endeavour.

I really feel very strongly that the person who runs for office is the courageous one, and the one who everybody has to know.

Cheerfulness prepares a glorious mind for all the noblest acts.

In high school, I once sang 'Let's Get It On' and 'Brown Sugar' with a band that included my English teacher and my math teacher.

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

Stop, open up, surrender the beloved blind silence. Stay there until you see you're looking at the light with infinite eyes.

My great-grandfather played organ for silent movies. Talkies in, Gramps out.

I wanted to know if the 'Iliad' in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages!

If variety is the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.

I think everyone needs to focus on the quality of the undergraduate experience.

Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.