I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production just like most of my movies were.

I'm doing 'Les Miserables ' the movie. I've done a lot of musicals and a lot of movies and I know there are not a lot of people in Hollywood who have been down those two paths so I've been like 'Come on let's do a movie/musical.'

I was very influenced by the musicals and romantic comedies of the 1930s. I admired Gene Harlow and such which probably explains why since the end of my marriage I've dated nothing but a succession of blondes.

I've studied all my musical life but learning is only good if you do something constructive with it.

I had a vision how it should sound and I put all my knowledge into this product and it is a fantastic product. People still tell me that I have the best musical thing there.

Listen to any musical phrase or rhythm and grasp it as a whole and you thereupon have present in you the image so to speak of the divine knowledge of the temporal order.

Even if you're improvising the fact that beforehand you know certain things will work helps you make those improvisations successful. It really helps to have a certain amount of knowledge about musical structure.

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion rather than keys and tempo.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.

My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form whether visual intellectual or musical.