“We're neither pure, nor wise, nor goodWe'll do the best we know.We'll build our house and chop our woodAnd make our garden grow.And make our garden grow!”

“This will be our reply to violence:to make music more intensely,more beautifully,more devotedly than ever before.”

“Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”

“I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.”

“Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”

“Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.”

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.”