My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. . . . He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, 'What about the man on the street?' At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street.

For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.

[Regarding indeterminacy]'...I think this interest had to do with his interest in painting. He used to put sheets of graph paper on the wall, and work on them …

...The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection.

It is my belief that Peter Pan is a great and refining and uplifting benefaction to this sordid and money-mad age; and the next best play is a long way behind.

Artists shouldn't be made famous. You know... they're just ... as important as... um doctors, and priests ... or maybe not as important sometimes, and yet they…

What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of 'art for …