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"The establishment in Britain is certainly against the arts and against education. If something doesn't make a profit, it's invalid, and art doesn't make a profit in that sense."
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"And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of IlAovatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide ad beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow from which its beauty chiefly came."

"The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."

"The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness."

"Let music ignite your vivid inner colors and bring you harmony inside and out."

"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual."

"The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal."
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"But when you get a bit older, and I hate to use the word, quite a bit more established, people take more notice and conducting becomes a great deal easier. You don't have battles like you had before."

"Recently I've been participating in radio and television talk programs doing broadcasts and conferences, and shooting my mouth off and really going to town."

"The demands are related to their questing of the best possible out of the people concerned. It's this going for the highest possible factor that I'm very concerned about."

"I'm very interested, for instance, in music in education - getting young people not only to listen to, but participate in the music that I write. I consider this one of the most vital aspects of my work."

"I'm not actually teaching any more, but I am writing pieces for schools all the time, and for kids."

"I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time."

"I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music."

"The present government is very insistent that business sponsorship should replace government sponsorship of the arts. Business sponsorship won't happen unless you make tax concessions, which they won't."

"I know what I want at least, and the older I get I think I'm better at getting it out of players and singers."

"I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion."
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