So I write melodies - thirty, forty, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide.

I would listen to something on the radio and try to tap out the melody, then the harmonies.

I have a very strange melodic gift: melodies come to me effortlessly.

My father had left behind an old piano. My sister was already going to school, my mother was out working, and I stayed at home alone with my adorable grandmother who understood nothing I said. It was so boring that I stayed at the piano all day long, and that saved my life.

Here is how I work: when I think that a film needs to have a principal theme, I search for a melody.

So I write melodies - thirty, forty, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide.

To play piano is a significant part of my life, my existence. It fulfills a very physical & spiritual need for me.

Repealing the estate tax won't create jobs, it won't boost GDP, and it won't add efficiency to the market. Instead, repealing the estate tax will simply add to the debt, hurt our ability to build a stronger economy and worsen economic inequality.

The spontaneous is the most beautiful thing that can appear in a picture, but nothing in art appears less spontaneously than that.

If you set goals and go after them with all the determination you can muster your gifts will take you places that will amaze you.

Free time is an illusion. Its what you get when you die and the gods reward you for a life spent working from dawn until midnight.

I realized I was the one doing all the training, earning the money, and my parents were living off of me.

Maybe one day I'll have a big hit, and the world will make a big sex symbol out of me like they always do when there's a new chick.

The things I have sold to film, I've sold because I was happy to rent out the right to adapt those works. Some things, I haven't sold to film, because I was less interested in having no control over the adaptation.

When I play, maybe 'Back o' Town Blues,' I'm thinking about one of the old, low-down moments - when maybe your woman didn't treat you right. That's a hell of a moment when a woman tell you, 'I got another mule in my stall.'

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

The number of ways you can live in one lifetime is limitless. So why limit yourself? The sky is NOT the limit. Beyond the universe is.

A mighty person is one who can control their emotions and make of an enemy a friend.

Greatness is never achieved through indecision.

When you have heart disease, you start to be tired of everything. It's like getting older. You become more white, and after that, grey. You have no feeling for anything.

A lot of my traditional audience does not appreciate my foray into politics.

I love that song 'I Could Have Danced All Night' from 'My Fair Lady' so much. I love that song because watching it as a kid, it was such an unbridled expression of joy.

I'm not for censorship without reason.

My friends are mostly familiar with music that plays on the mainstream radio.

You take unacceptable risk, you have to be prepared to face the consequence.

When I look at my daughter, who's 24, she is much more confident than I ever was and her expectations are higher. But I worry that there is a backlash brewing against progress on equality.

Many tennis coaches are enablers. They need the job more than the player needs the coach, and if the coach needs the job more than the player needs the coach, he can't effect change.

I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something.

Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.

The opinions of the misanthropical rest upon this very partial basis, that they adopt the bad faith of a few as evidence of the worthlessness of all.

I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman.