“A carefree quality is a whole aspect of life that I will never understand. I don't think I have ever been carefree and can't see the pleasure of it.”

“All my music is very simple in that melody is usually clearly stated.”

“Any film which views the darker side of life, which is death with a sense of humor, is very much to my taste.”

“Big Sur is at the end of the continent. It attracts really crazy people.”

“Carefully execute every instruction given to you by the director, producer, and studio. But that would be a life not worth living.”

“Connection is what one is after in probably most media, but certainly in film, which is an immersive medium.”

“Death is always around the corner, but often our society gives it inordinate help.”

“Hopefully each film can be given a musical voice of its own, which is not to say that the instrumentation is always unique, but that the relationship between the sound and the image is unique.”

“How does my music connect to an audience? That is just a complete mystery to me.”

“I don't find myself lobbying for projects. Filmmakers almost always come to me.”

“I don't personally see my work as being dark. What interests me is a balance between light and dark.”

“I like business and personal life to be distinct.”

“I like the fact that New York looks a bit backwards, toward the Old World, rather than resolutely forwards.”

“I prefer a life in which we don't take ourselves too seriously.”

“I think I've only done one horror movie, Psycho III. That was a walk in the park compared to a romantic comedy.”

“I would like to do a science fiction film some day. Star Wars seems really to have destroyed the genre, which at one time offered great musical opportunities.”

“I write music to please myself. Hopefully the director's enjoying it too.”

“If not bliss, ignorance can at least be fun.”

“John Barry was my hero when I was about 13. His scores to the James Bond movies were the scores of my life back then.”

“John Barry was the first film composer I was aware of. As a teenager I owned several of his Bond soundtracks.”

“Los Angeles is an industry town, and it has great facilities and personnel. The disadvantage is that everyone there seems to talk about the same subject matter.”

“Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.”

“New Yorkers may think they're on some cutting edge, but that's not especially true. It is, however, the most exciting heterogeneous mess of a town I've ever seen.”

“On Being John Malkovich and the cinema of the absurd, I do enjoy it. I wish there were more like it. The very fact that there can't be more like it is one of the reasons it's admirable.”

“The flow of Guiness into the studio was inspirational as well as nutritive.”

“When the systems we expect to help us actually hurt us, we have tragedy.”