Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.

I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.

We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree.

Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart?

To retire is to begin to die.

Music will save the world.

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.

The first thing to do in life is to do with purpose what one purposes to do.

The heart of the melody can never be put down on paper.

I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.

You must work - we must all work to make the world worthy of its children.

Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.

To retire is to die.

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.

The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

As long as one can admire and love, then one is young forever.

The Cello is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older but younger with time more slender more supple more graceful.

The capacity to care is what gives life its most deepest significance.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

Even miracles take a little time.

Don't play the notes. Play the meaning of the notes.

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border

There is no substitute for work; what seems ease of performance comes from the greatest labor.

Rock n' roll is poison put to sound.

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

There are no black film composers doing the likes of Star Wars, doing the likes of E.T., doing the likes of Jurassic Park. There are none, nor will there ever be one. That ain't about to happen!

When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.

Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.

A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

America can well expect to develop a goodly amount of composers for she has a goodly number of people.

Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.

Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

Although technical discussions are interesting to composers, I suspect that the truly magical and spiritual powers of music arise from deeper levels of our psyche.

The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range of pop and other materials and techniques required of them than I probably would, faced with the same challenge.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.

Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.

There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.

I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.

The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

Composers are not all good conductors.

Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.