What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.

- John Corigliano

If you take a violin, you can make it sound 50 different ways. Not just pizzicato and played by the bow, but ponticello, and harmonics, and tremolos.…

- John Corigliano

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

- John Corigliano

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

- John Corigliano

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

- John Corigliano

The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range…

- John Corigliano

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

- John Corigliano

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

- John Corigliano

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he'…

- John Corigliano