"One of the most common failings [when writing a drum track] is repetition. Nobody wants to hear that same stupid 16-line bass-snare pattern throughout the WHOLE song. Didn't your mother ever teach you that variety is the spice of life?"

"A song is not just a collection of melodic riffs, it is an emotional statement."

"I'm starting to realize that touring really involves a lot of waiting around doing nothing."

"I feel that music is the art which can best express the emotions which flow within us. It conveys something bigger than it is."

"JS Bach has been called 'the supreme arbiter and law-giver of music'. He is to music what Leonardo da Vinci is to art and Shakespeare is to literature, one of the supreme creative geniuses of history."

"Dem höchsten Gott allein zu Ehren, Dem Nächsten draus sich zu belehren."

"Und soll wie aller Musik also auch des Generalbasses Finis und Endursache anders nicht als nur zu Gottes Ehre und Recreation des Gemütes sein. Wo dieses nicht in acht genommen wird, ists keine eigentliche Musik, sondern ein Teuflisches Geplerr und Geleier."

"Not brook, but ocean should be his name (Bach is the German word for brook.)"

"Bach is the immortal God of Harmony."

"To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation."

"To be able to hear J. S. Bach take a melody and improvise what amounts to a spontaneous composition is the most amazing thing I can think of."

"My hero was J. S. Bach. It was from his works that I came to understand mathematics and, through a greater understanding of math, came to a greater understanding of Bach—the golden ratio, the rise of complexity through the reiteration of simple elements, the presence of the cosmic in the common."

"One of the most extraordinary things about history's most extraordinary musician is the fact that this man's music, which exerts such a magnetic attraction for us today, against which we tend to measure much of the achievement in the art of music in the last two centuries, that this music had absolutely no effect on either the musicians or the public of his own day. And the strange thing about Bach is that he doesn't at all fit our conception of the misunderstood genius who was years ahead of his time. He was certainly misunderstood, but not because he was ahead of his time, rather because according the musical disposition of that day, he was generations behind it."

"For Bach, it wasn't finality that mattered in music, it was simply the joyous essence of being."

"The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile."

"I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can't think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that – its humanity."

"Bach is, for me, the touchstone that keeps my playing honest. Keeping the intonation pure in double stops, bringing out the various voices where the phrasing requires it, crossing the strings so that there are not inadvertent accents, presenting the structure in such a way that it's clear to the listener without being pedantic - one can't fake things in Bach, and if one gets all of them to work, the music sings in the most wonderful way."

"Pongileoni's bowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking onto it vibrating: and thus in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward's apartment on the further side. The shaking air rattled Lord Edward's membrane tympani; the interlocked malleus, incus, and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth. The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edwards ecstatically whispered "Bach!""

"I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course."

"All roads lead to Bach."

"Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all."

"We are young, heartache to heartache we stand No promises, no demands Love is a battlefield. We are strong, no one can tell us were wrong Searchin our hearts for so long, both of us knowing Love is a battlefield."

"Don't count on me I engineer on every Move we make from here I'll take the lead You take the pain You see, I engineered This game."

"Händel ist der Größte und Fähigste aller Komponisten; von ihm kann ich immer noch lernen."

"Händel ist der größte Komponist, der je lebte. Ich würde meine Kopfbedeckung abnehmen und auf seinem Grab knien."

"Händel ist der unerreichte Meister aller Meister. Gehen Sie und lernen Sie von ihm, wie gewaltige Wirkungen mit einfachen Mitteln zu erreichen ist."

"Er ist der Meister von uns allen!"

"You have taken far too much trouble over your opera. Here in England that is mere waste of time. What the English like is something that they can beat time to, something that hits them straight on the drum of the ear."

"Handel is so great and so simple that no one but a professional musician is unable to understand him."

"I did think I did see all heaven before me, and the great God himself."

"Whether I was in my body or out of my body I know not. God knows it!"

"Every Englishman believes that Handel now occupies an important position in heaven. If so, le bon Dieu must feel toward him very much as Louis Treize felt toward Richelieu."

"Handel paralysed music in England for generations and they have not yet quite got over him."

"Handel is one of the giants of musical history. His is happy, confident, melodic music imbued with the grace of the Italian vocal school, an easy fluency in German contrapuntal writing and the English choral tradition inherited from Purcell."

"I should be sorry if I only entertained them, I wish to make them better."

"His hallelujahs open the heavens. He utters the word "Wonderful," as if all their trumpets spoke together. And then, when he comes to earth, to make love amidst nymphs and shepherds (for the beauties of all religions found room within his breast), his strains drop milk and honey, and his love is the youthfulness of the Golden Age."

"Sonia Mowlicker."

"I don't eat sugary cereal."

"Thank you! Welcome to the Universe of Sanjaya!"

"I learned the hula, so now I know how to shake my booty Hawaiian style."

"I hope she saw the passion, and no need to tell Mark Anthony about it."

"I would have Simon Cowell sing 'Shiny Happy People' by R.E.M. just to show his true personality."

"I like singing in the street, so if you saw a little Indian kid walking on the street singing loudly, that was probably me."

"Let's give them something to talk about, other than H A I R!"

"Sour patch kids gone wild."

"When life gives you lemons, get tequila and salt."

"I just wanted to sing on TV."

"I didn't know people had that much water in them!"