By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know.

Improvisation is terribly haphazard.

Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing.

The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get.

Today, with a recording, he can hear the thing enough times until he really gets acquainted with the language, and then he can begin to make an estimate of the intrinsic, aesthetic value of that piece of music.

To the person that deals in visualizations, I suppose there is something rather exciting about a whole set of people - they all going symmetrically, up or down, in a military sort of precision.

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

A person improvising is sometimes very fortunate that just at that second things coincide.

I'm really interested in writing a piece of music that will move you, that will really move you. That is really the only reason that I'm writing music.

I think there have been some periods when the writing almost became a bit of a burden.

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.

You write it down because finally, when it's written down you do get it out of your system somewhat.

Hopefully, I have a certain amount of what you call musical talent.

I distrust anything that you don't hear.

By the visual pattern, but mostly I'm guided entirely by my ear, what I hear.

We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising.

But in the end, music is ultimately an aural art, pure and simple.

Because essentially Schoenberg was an extremely gifted man. And in spite of many of his theories and so on, when he really began to write music, he still was guided very much by his internal hearing, by what we call your internal ear.

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know.

When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there.

In writing music, the structure of each piece is a very important factor.

Well, no. I believe that it's not at all impossible that some of the performances that I've heard so far by some pianists may be superior to my own playing because those are two totally different acts altogether.

Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided.

Now, what we are not talking about, what you're really coming to, is what compromises one makes so that the listener understands somewhat of what you're doing, what you're trying to express.

The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment.

There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

It doesnt necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

Being an atheist makes someone a clearer thinking, fairer person. They are not doing things to be rewarded in heaven; they're doing things because they're right, because they live by a moral code.

I realized how far-reaching the effect of hip hop was when I walked by a jewelry store named Bling in a small, rural town in France. Hip hop has made a huge impact on urban culture. Yet many brands still don't speak to young people in a tone and manner that's representative of them.

Does everything in this life begin and end with Judy Blume? Perhaps.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

I love my father as the stars hes a bright shining example and a happy twinkling in my heart.

I love chilling in a cute sweatsuit and wedge sandals or sneakers.

I am particularly disturbed that our country is the largest financial supporter of an organization that not only wastes a lot of our money but also seems to be increasingly anti-American in its policies and conduct.

It's not the most intellectual job in the world, but I do have to know the letters.

I'm not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It'll have a warming impact.

I just have mysteries in all my books, I think, whether it's a boy investigating or a girl. I have an enduring fascination with mysteries of all kinds.

We assume in our daily lives that the world is both safe and sane. Otherwise, we could not carry on.

Put work into your dreams.

It all started with the most basic level of Uta Hagen, right at the beginning. I'm like, 'Really? I came to grad school; I'm going to do the 'Respect for Acting'?' And I realized the importance of that, because it was really to just get you to get rid of everything. Get rid of everything you've learned and just start from the bottom up.

I think for a long time I wasn't really out to myself growing up in Omaha, Neb., to a Catholic conservative family. It took me a while to come out to myself, and not long after that, I came out to them. I think that it really couldn't have been a better experience. They were all immediately supportive.

I remember Robert Plant coming backstage after the first show saying, 'Hey, boys, I should be opening for you.' That felt pretty good.

Always give your best todays great work is tomorrows benchmark.

I was embarrassed that I even wanted to become an actress because coming from L.A., with two older sisters in the business and a mom who had been a ballet dancer, it was such a cliche.

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.

The Gospel of Thomas claims to be the secret sayings of Jesus. There are 114 of them, so it says many things, but the central message is that Jesus is the one who reveals the divine light that brought the universe into being, and that you and I also reveal that light.