When I Am With Composers, I Say

I Believe In People. I Feel, Love, Need And Respect People Above All Else, Including Natural Scenery, Organized Piety And Nationalistic Superstructures. One Human Figure On The Slope Of A Mountain Can Make The Mountain Disappear For Me, One Person Fighting For Truth Can Disqualify For Me The Entire System Which Had Dispensed It.

You Can Sit There, Tense And Worried, Freezing The Creative Energies, Or You Can Start Writing Something. It Doesn't Matter What. In Five Or Ten Minutes, The Imagination Will Heat, The Tightness Will Fade, And A Certain Spirit And Rhythm Will Take Over.

This Will Be Our Reply To Violence: To Make Music More Intensely, More Beautifully, More Devotedly Than Ever Before.

Our Most Emotionally Active Life Is Lived In Our Dreams, And Our Cells Renew Themselves Most Industriously In Sleep. We Reach Highest In Meditation, And Farthest In Prayer. In Stillness Every Human Being Is Great; He Is Free From The Experience Of Hostility; He Is A Poet, And Most Like An Angel.

Which Of My Jewish Roots Do I Follow?