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A good composer does not imitate; he steals.  
A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a...  
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that so...  
Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 per...  
I am an inventor of music.  
I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I c...  
I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mis...  
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.  
In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is mo...  
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very ess...  
It's one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generat...  
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspi...  
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.  
My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send ...  
My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name ...  
My music is best understood by children and animals.  
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a ...  
Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also ...  
Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.  
The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is we...  
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And t...  
The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not alwa...  
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taug...  
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears als...  
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.  
What force is more potent than love?  
When I discovered that I had been made custodian of this gift, in my e...