Aaron Copland

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.