Discipline is essential to creativity. Rarely is anything right the first time. Maybe, maybe you get it on the fifth try. Discipline involves tenacity and steadfastness. It has to be applied vigorously every day. Music is athletic. You have to train every day in order to perform. If you get lazy, you get weak. Musicians are like joggers. If you jog

John was too enamored and awed by music to ever claim mastery of it, and there was always so much more to learn about music and its mysteries that “a lifetime was not enough”—a Sergei Rachmaninoff quote he repeated like scripture.

Reflecting on the message about priorities in Hook, he added: “I want to take the time to write some concert music, to travel less, and read, walk, and spend time with my grandchildren.”

But he did offer his teenage son a kernel of wisdom: “He once advised me to ‘Write it down before you forget it. It may be better than you think.’ ”64

the beauty of finding what it is that you love to do, and then finding the beauty of knowing that you will not be able to do that forever.

Williams has mastered the time-honored technique of composing music with “interchangeable parts,” a technique applied with equal success to automobile assembly by that granddaddy of corporate presidents, Henry Ford.85

For Miller, John was “a profound intellect and a profound intuition working in some sort of interplay—one feeding the other. So you can get the great analytical mind, and you can get the completely free, intuitive mind. But the synergy that happens when the two are together is in John Williams.”96

He never knew his drummer father, but trees can be enchanted and roots are powerful, and he picked up the beat all the same.

It’s a very odd feeling to know that I wrote the scores to all of the top five grossing films, and to seven of the top ten—I try not to think about it, but it does say something about luck, doesn’t it? I consider myself a very lucky man. And it’s healthy to remind myself that I probably wrote scores to more than my share of the bottom seven films