"If you read about African music, they believe that during the process of making this music that you come into contact with spirits from another plane. They say that this place is like a mirror of the world we live in…With the best music, you don't find the composer or the musicians within the work, you find yourself, your own feelings."

"In magic—and in life—there is only the present moment, the now. You can’t measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. “Time” doesn’t pass. We human beings have enormous difficult…"

"The most sensitive musical instrument is the human soul. The next is the human voice. One must purify the soul until it begins to sound. A composer is a musical instrument and at the same time, a perf…"

"The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the servi…"

"I was in the middle of shooting the last few weeks of Blazing Saddles somewhere in the Antelope Valley, and Gene Wilder and I were having a cup of coffee and he said, I have this idea that there could…"