“I don't know the names of any pop musicians. Pop music is standardised...” — Ennio Morricone Quote

“I don't know the names of any pop musicians. Pop music is standardised; it's made to please the largest audience possible. I also compose to please a large audience, but when you listen to my music, you understand that I have studied and applied the whole history of composition.”

“When I have to score a film, I watch the movie first and then start thinking about it. And from that moment on, it is as if I were pregnant. I then have to deliver the child, so from that moment on, I think always about the music - even when I go to the grocery store, I think about it.”

“It had a very good arrangement by Herbie Hancock, but it used existing pieces.”

“Music needs room to breathe.”

“I like to feel and understand people's contentment with what I've done.”

“Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I don't understand why this happens in the movie industry.”

“I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.”

“Scoring the first 10 in history was a big deal, but the fact that even an electronic scoreboard could not figure out how to put out a score, it made the story more historic.”

“If I could apologise and go back and change history I would do. But the goal is still a goal, Argentina became world champions and I was the best player in the world.”

“In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.”

“I loved history in my school days, and I have always been a voracious reader. But in India, you end up doing MBA, engineering or medicine.”