We may brave human laws but we cannot resist natural ones.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

For some reason the evolutionists have not come up with an evolution-based explanation for why human beings react so powerfully to music. But surely they will.

We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems seeing a painting listening to some music some opera which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which more than any other ministers to the human spirit.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

I would say that although my music may be or may have been part of the cultural background fabric of the gay community I consider myself an outsider who belongs everywhere and nowhere... Being a human being is what truly counts. That's where you'll find me.