“Ideally, a song should contain both elements of high melodic tension, and low melodic tension. No listener wants to sit through a totally high-energy 180 BPM non-stop 6-minute ride through synth mania unless they are already busy grooving madly on some dance floor in a smoky club somewhere. Also, unless your listener is on heavy sedation, he or she will not enjoy your sparse 18-minute ambient tune which consists of the same languid piano riff repeated over and over again.”

“To impact someone emotionally, [a musical piece] has to contain "interesting" melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic content, and what defines "interesting" is up to the listener.”

“I've got no particular desire to play ten minute solos. Those were never valid anyway in my book -- never. It was just a cheap way of building up a tension in the audience…A solo should do something; it shouldn't just be there as a cosmetic. It should have some aim, take the tune somewhere. I'm not saying I can do it, but I try and take the tune somewhere.”

“Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point.”

“I want to write music. I want to sit down right now at the piano, and write a song that people will listen to and remember. And do the same thing every morning for the rest of my life.”

“I like to read things I've read before. It's like listening over and over to your favorite song.”

“This intersecting of inherently non-symmetrical diatonic elements with inherently non-diatonic symmetrical elements seems to me the defining principle of the musical language of Le Sacre and the source of the unparalleled tension and conflicted energy of the work.”

“I keep wanting to repeat over and over and over again, the pain and shock of difference, the joy of commonness, the exhilaration of meeting through incredible odds against it.”

“No story lives unless someone wants to listen.”

“Women are good listeners, but it’s a waste of time telling your troubles to a man unless there’s something specific you want him to do.”