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

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.

Let justice be done, though the world perish.

The film 'Black Hawk Down' paints the Somali people as wild savages.

I believe that we haven't begun to understand the many forces that bind the physical world, any more than we understand our own minds and what they're capable of.

On Twitter, if you want to quote someone else, you say, 'RT, re-tweet, that person's name, and then what they said before.' And it's a way of essentially saying, 'I'm not saying this, but my friend said this and I thought this was interesting.'

My parents were in high school when I was born. My mom was 16, my dad was 17. They were kids, at the very beginning of coming into their own and finding themselves.

My mom's passionate and energetic and very funny and enthusiastic.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.

I can't really see another squad tryna cross us.

Sometimes a little heartbreak is a lesson, and the best thing to do is just learn the lesson.

Films have gotten leaner and leaner, cutting out all variations from the story line.

If you didn't laugh at Jared Fogle, then you would cry.

We had a good cast and we loved each other.

I think there's bipartisan support in the Senate to pass a good reform bill.

Spirituality lies in what you do and how you do it and not what result you get.

The moment my niece came into the world, I realized that logic can't make sense of someone who's so brand new to you.

I have more of an identity with Cowher than I do Tomlin. I knew Cowher when he came over from Kansas City as a defensive coordinator, and his teams were tough. Tomlin came in from Minnesota, and I didn't know anything about him. So maybe it's unfair for me to make the comparison.

It is not alone the fact that women have generally had to spend most of their strength in caring for others that has handicapped them in individual effort but also that they have almost universally had to care wholly for themselves.

Lots of times I was out through forcing the game.

Creative clutter is better than idle neatness.