Top 112 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Giacchino

One of the things I was never thrilled about with 'Medal of Honor' was that it was non-stop music.

I think that one of the things I'd learned from being so attentive to the careers of the people I've admired is the fact that they would say 'no' a lot. Early on, I took that as a cue to only work on things that I knew I would be passionate about.

The Internet's a crazy place to hang out because it's insane to see so many people doing so many creative things all over the map.

My dad gave me his camera, so I spent my childhood making movies with the kids in the neighborhood as actors.

I've always looked at guys who I've admired, like John Williams and Lalo Schifrin and Max Steiner, and looked at the choices they made and always try to take a cue from that.

For me, growing-up music was always about telling stories.

It wasn't until high school that I actually started writing. I was in a lot of the school plays and musicals, and there was a lot of down time during rehearsals. I would go into the orchestra pit and mess around on the grand piano.

I love percussive instrumentation.

I think that to capture food in music, you really are capturing an emotional response to food.

Who can't relate to a story of a dreamer who, against all odds, is going to make something of himself that is completely unexpected?

I feel like I'll be writing World War 2 music the rest of my life.

Life is #1 on the agenda, and #2 is work.

I always feel like my writing is consistently influenced by everything I watched and listened to growing up, so it's just this crazy collage of everything, you know.

I think I learned everything about comedy and timing and drama from watching 'The Muppet Show,' which was one of the best shows ever produced.

I like live musicians and personally orchestrate about 80 to 90% of all my scores.

I'm not the kind of person who works 24 hours a day, mostly out of laziness; I don't know.

When I was 10, I had a group of friends that I used to love to make movies with, and we made them growing up; we did it all through high school.

In 'Ratatouille,' there are two different themes that express the two sides of Remy's personality: the creative side: the chef, and the 'thief' side: his nature as a mouse.

There's so much fun you can have with your instruments that no one ever taught you.

I like to write a piece of music that reflects how I felt about a film as opposed to, here's this action scene; here's this set piece.

I grew up listening to 'Planet of the Apes' and other scores, and it was fun for me because you weren't just listening to those scores, but you were also questioning what you were listening to. What are those sounds?

If you look at my credits, most of them are the same directors over and over.

I always loved movies like 'King Kong' and 'Planet of the Apes,' monster movies, Ray Harryhausen films, all of that stuff. I always loved the music in them, too.

'Lost' is such a thematic show that I'm always afraid that if I know something's going to happen at the end, I'll subconsciously write something in where someone who's astute will go, 'Oh, he used so-and-so's theme: that must mean so-and-so is coming back!'

Working with Kevin Feige has just been a joy.

I even went to film school at School of Visual Arts in New York City. And then, after that, I got a day job at Universal publicity department, then moved over to Disney publicity department. So I had this day job, and at night I would study music.

That's one of the neat things about 'Call of Duty.' There are areas in the game where we were able to score the gameplay.

I think the Wachowskis are two of my favorite people on the planet; they're the best.

As an audience member, everyone I talk to is like, 'I'm so excited to see 'Super 8.' I'm so excited to see it.' And part of that is because of his drive to make sure that it stays hidden until the last minute.

I don't like working all hours of the night and having an unreliable working pattern.

There are a lot of guys who do this job, and they have tons of assistants. They all kind of write together, and for me, it's basically me here in this room, and that's it.

I loved writing 'Lost.' It was like a never-ending opera, in a way.

I grew up listening to every style of music you can imagine, and I have a love for all of it.

That's the time I remember as a kid, being so excited to go to the movies. To be part of that now is really an amazing gift.

Sometimes people do things because they are sad or because they are upset or were hurt by other people.

For some reason, as a kid, I felt outwardly embarrassed to say that I liked rock music. I don't know where that came from. For me, it just wasn't cool - orchestral music was cool.

I have an uncle who was heavily involved in World War 2, so over the years, I've talked to him many times.

I started out as a producer. and I used to work at Disney. and I worked with a lot of the animators and went on to become great friends with a lot of these guys and worked on a lot of projects together.

When I was growing up, every show had live music. Now, almost none have live music. Probably 97 percent of the shows on television are probably synthesized, or mostly synthesized, and that's a shame.

If you have a bad story on your hands, you have a bad story on your hands, and no amount of score re-working is gonna save that.

Of everything I've done in my career, or whatever you want to call it, 'Lost' is the purest version of me musically.

I try to keep a regular work schedule.

I grew up with so many different sounds, and 'Lost' allows me to express all of it, the melodic and the atonal.

People on 'The Incredibles' would ask me if I listened to a lot of spy scores, but no, I don't.

For me, the music is always speaking from the point of view of the characters. Rarely do you score an event.

I used to do puppet shows as a kid - me and my brother would do them - and then any poor soul who came into the house had to sit and watch our puppet shows.

When I was a kid, I wanted to make movies. In particular, I loved animation and would love to have been an animator.

Hopefully, by the time I do a project, I already have a true understanding and love of what I'm about to do because if I don't, I'm not going to work on that project. I really want to have those connections so I can be truthful to the emotional aspect of what I have to deliver for the story.

I was obsessed with 'The Twilight Zone' as a kid, and one of those things I didn't realize until I was in college was that I had been listening to Bernard Herrmann all my life.

My entire life was making movies.

I made tons of stop motion films with my friends in my neighborhood.

I've always, always, always listened to music since I was, like, 7 years old and made up stories in my head based on what I was hearing.

My parents loved music, but they weren't musicians. So my musical training as a young kid was limited to piano lessons. I was not the best student; I was awful, never practiced. But I was always interested in just messing around on the piano.

I was fortunate enough in my public school that they had a full music program, and no one escaped it. It was treated as a subject that was as important as everything else, and I believe it is.

I've been pretty lucky in that I'm not a big writer's block kind of person.

I think my writing has an old-fashioned feel to it for whatever reason. I'm just so influenced by the music that I listened to growing up, a lot of it out of the '60s, so it has a natural tendency to feel like it's from another era.

Music helps immensely with math skills, and math skills help immensely with music skills.

You've all seen movies where the music isn't working with the story. And it's either because... the story isn't working itself. Or the composer kinda just wants to write whatever they want to write, not paying attention to the thing.

When you're starting out in this business, it's very easy to want to say yes to everything that's offered to you.

Most television, the music is very much the same from show to show.