I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment... rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart, such as I have felt it since my childhood.

Our experience is composed rather of illusions lost than of wisdom acquired.

My education as a film composer, you can't not - if you like the orchestra like I do, if you are a symphonist like I am - you can't not listen to John Williams' work.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

The American diet causes disease. It is composed of 25 percent animal products and 62 percent processed foods and only 5 percent of calories from fruits and vegetables.

My diet is mostly composed of whole-grain cereals, legumes, beans, lentils. Lots of cooked, baked, or steamed vegetables. Lots of spices like curcumin or cumin that help aid digestion. Some superfoods.

Jerry Goldsmith, I have to say, is my single favorite composer of all time. He was one of the most innovative guys ever to do it. You go back to 'Planet of the Apes' and it is just a monumental score - the sound design and approach to percussion was just so extraordinary. One of his great scores for me was 'Alien.'

I think I compose as a listener: improvising and listening back excites me because I get to ideas that never would have occurred. Then I bring in the computers and samplers... and I begin to loop and process and change them.

If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.

Music is composed on computers and other electronic equipment; producers don't want to spend money on orchestra.

In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.

Juries are not computers. They are composed of human beings who evaluate evidence differently.

It still amazes me how many musicians aren't really interested in engaging with their audience at all. Alfred Brendel, a pianist for whom I have the greatest respect, has described performance as a sacred communion between the artist and the composer. But what about the audience? Music is communication, a two-way street.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Just recently, I thought about how maybe I should have kept using the synthesisers more after 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence'; then, I would have been a more unique soundtrack composer than I am now. It could have been my signature. But then, probably, Bertolucci would not have offered me to compose for his films.

The 'Story of Silent Night', which was given to me one Christmas when I was six - it was the story of a down and out composer who had no ideas left, and it was Christmas, and he came up with the hymn 'Silent Night.'

I just have to take my chances like any other composer.

Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.

For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country.

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.