“I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.”

“I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.”

“Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.”

“And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.”

“She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost.”

“Chance was just an order that you hadn't yet perceived.”

“Creation is much in need of ordering.”

“The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.”

“Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.”

“Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free.”

“The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.”