Quotes from John Williams

As a young pianist in Hollywood, I began orchestrating for others, and I just felt really comfortable doing that.

I always wrote music for my friends, but my focus was on playing piano. I didn't think I'd be quite good enough to be a soloist, but I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could work as a player, a teacher.

I let it go. I have not looked at the 'Star Wars' films, and that's absolutely true.

I fell in love immediately with Daisy Ridley. She is just a superstar born.

she seemed happy, though perhaps a bit desperately so

I think of myself as a film composer.

For me, there is a strong family connection to Boston and anything connected to Boston, which includes Fenway.

I don't make a particular distinction between 'high art' and 'low art.' Music is there for everybody. It's a river we can all put our cups into and drink it and be sustained by it.

When you think about Boston, Harvard and M.I.T. are the brains of the city, and its soul might be Faneuil Hall or the State House or the Old Church. But I think the pulsing, pounding heart of Boston is Fenway Park.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

I, over the years, have always felt more comfortable if I could go into a projection room and look at a film and not really know what to expect. If you read the script first, you form all kinds of preconceptions about how things look, what the location's like, what the actors are like.

The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.

When we see Rey, we want to hear Rey's theme, and when the Force is referred to or felt, we want to hear the Force theme, and so on. We hope that these references make sense to the fans and make the aural connections that we want them to have.

There are occasionally eureka moments - off the top of my head, maybe Darth Vader's theme, you know, the imperial march.

So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it's gratifying to have something you have done linger in people's memories.

I'm happy to be busy. I'm happy to have a wonderful family.

The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.

Because in the long run' Stoner said, 'it isn't Edith or even Grace, or the certainty of losing Grace, that keeps me here; it isn't the scandal or the hurt to you or me; it isn't the hardship we would have to go through, or even the loss of love we might have to face. It's simply the destruction of ourselves, of what we would do'.

They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them.

Every victory enlarges the magnitude of our possible defeat.

When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh.

But don't you know, Mr Stoner?' Sloane asked. 'Don't you understand about yourself yet? You're going to be a teacher.

But there is much that cannot go into books, and that is the loss with which I become increasingly concerned.

It was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study. It was himself that he was slowing shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.