I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

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.

Mature love is composed and sustaining; a celebration of commitment, companionship, and trust.

Forever is composed of nows.

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.

I have to be composed; I have to be poised. I have to remember what my first piano teacher told me: 'You do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you.

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

You tend to compose things more in the middle of frame in 3-D than you would in a conventional frame. You can really see composition in 2-D but in 3-D your composition is much more complex. Everything has to be artificially enhanced. But you do gain something else with 3-D: you have a sense of space and heightened reality.

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

In science, if you don't do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didn't compose the 'Ninth Symphony,' no one else before or after is going to compose the 'Ninth Symphony' that he composed; no one else is going to paint 'Starry Night' by van Gogh.

Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.

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.

I proposed to my wife on Brighton Beach, and she said yes. That's pretty romantic. Even though I forgot to go down on one knee because I was too busy trying to compose the question.

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.

Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.

Samir is a well composed person. Dolly Bindra tried his patience big time.

Becoming a father allowed me to become a much better composer, because it allowed me to have tremendous patience. I have much more tolerance for opposing opinions, short attention spans, changes of heart. And faith in the future.

The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.

I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.

Every day I paint, and every day I compose music.

Music would lose its charm were not dissonance interspersed at frequent intervals. The closer a composer can come to discord without actually entering it in the score, the more pleasing will be his composition when given life through musical instruments.

In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.