John Towner Williams quotes:

When you think about Boston, Harvard and M.I.T. are the brains of the city, and its soul might be Faneuil Hall or the State House or the Old Church. But I think the pulsing, pounding heart of Boston is Fenway Park.

Some kids, for some reason, it just doesn't click in the classroom as they need it to. We have college coaches talk to them, former high school athletes, motivational speakers, teachers, principals.

There's a very basic human, non-verbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression. It doesn't have to do with body movements, it doesn't have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual.

Lust and learning. That's really all there is, isn't it?

There was a perception that the emerging-market problems aren't over and concern that may Brazil devalue.

The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.

Middle age, my boy. No memory at all.

You may need to refresh

So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it's gratifying to have something you have done linger in people's memories.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

I find that musically, looking back, I have learned much more from those relationships, people I have bumped into that I have admired, that's the way I feel musically I have learned most in life.

A chap can't pick the way he'll die, or we'd all do better at it.

I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.

My God, to read without joy is stupid.