Hors D'oeuvre: A ham sandwich cut into forty pieces.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
It is a funny thing, but when I am making music, all the answers I seek for in life seem to be there, in the music. Or rather, I should say, when I am making music, there are no questions and no need for answers.
A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.
The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.
What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
That's what building a body of work is all about. It's about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime to a lasting legacy. It's about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star, because the one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished. It's cumulative. It deepens and expands with each day you give your best. You may have setbacks and you may have failures, but you're not done.
There's no greater model, in my view, than Jesus Christ.
Sometimes it feels like energy or electricity when it is moving in and through us, but spiritual power is really a distinctive kind of knowledge that is like the key that opens the door or the switch that starts the energy moving.