After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Our experience is composed rather of illusions that of wisdom acquired.

When written in Chinese the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

The first year I started in San Francisco there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.

Viewed freely the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect race and range of time and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

I have spent over 60 years bent over a guitar and to know that I wrote 70 compositions that masters have recorded that makes me feel so good and full and proud and thankful to the good Lord.

I was very much fascinated with the technology we had that we could edit in the computer our compositions but all the sounds that were available on the market were crap.

With the help of modern technology I can compose intricate keyboard parts and then I have to go back and learn them in order to perform them properly.

I've been a teacher at the college level in composition mostly and I've been an editor on magazines.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989 my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

Good composition is like a suspension bridge - each line adds strength and takes none away.

Our strength is often composed of the weakness that we're damned if we're going to show.

Society is composed of two great classes those who have more dinners than appetite and those who have more appetite than dinners.

Everybody has a right to like or dislike anything or anyone. From a flower to a flavor to a book or a composition but it is very sad that in our country we actually fight over such things in an unseemly manner.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics Brahms so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

Since the composer has said everything if you discover everything it will be enough and you will be a happy man. Don't try to say it's your taste and because of that you are changing this or that. And I must say this respect is still there.

Ragtime has about the same amount of respect as comics. And in a way they're similar art forms. Ragtime is highly compositional and the emotion in the music is built in whereas in jazz a lot of that emotion comes from the way it's performed.

I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish it is his idea I am embellishing.

My religion lies in my composition.

With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann his favorite composer in Torn Curtain after the bitter fight between them.

And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced is good.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.