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"Both parents were very encouraging - especially my father. My father thought the sun rose and set with me. Neither one had a musical background or any musical talent. They liked classical music, but neither could carry a tune."
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"88% of what we call good songs aren't really good. They merely remind us of a good time we once had."
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Personal Development
"Harpists spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune."
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Personal Development
"Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."
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Personal Development
"Music is the fertilizer for heart to bloom the flower of love and peace."
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Personal Development
"Music opens the window of the soul to let the nectar of life come in."
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Personal Development
"Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense."
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Personal Development
"You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture."
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Personal Development
"The best songs I write in 20 minutes."
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Personal Development
"I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world."
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Personal Development
"I'm half Jewish, I'm half black, I look in-between. I dress funny. I play all these different styles of music on one record. It's like, What is he doing?"
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"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."
Politics
"I want to make the world better."
Want
"It's true that I tend to daydream. I'm the same person in business as I am in music: I can be distracted and absentminded. It's my style."
Business
"Both parents were very encouraging - especially my father. My father thought the sun rose and set with me. Neither one had a musical background or any musical talent. They liked classical music, but neither could carry a tune."
Music
"I don't think events in your life affect your music."
Life
"I've managed to dodge the curse. Not all my family have. Of course, music helped me - music is all about civilization, about something worthwhile. It's all about ideas."
Family
"I've had every advantage in the world, despite the 18 years of silence which were nobody's fault but mine."
Mistake
"I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine."
Music
"If you have more money than you need, you have to give it away. It's a duty. I get to choose whom to sponsor, and I like to give to the areas that I know something about."
Money
"I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano."
Poetry
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