My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers..

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears..

Although our "gentle air" cannot improve the way hate and envy look, it does seem not to encourage firmness and decision. All is compromise; caution ….

I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I ….

My music is not modern, it is merely badly played.

Great art must proceed to precision and brevity. It presupposes the alert mind of an educated listener who, in a singleact of thinking, includes with….

I find above all that the expression, atonal music, is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying the art of not falling, or swimming the ….

You cannot expect the Form before the Idea,For they will come into being together..

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major..

An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable ….

I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!.

In Spring! In the creation of art it must be as it is in Spring!.

I owe very, very much to Mozart; and if one studies, for instance, the way in which I write for string quartet, then one cannot deny that I have lear….

Market value is irrelevant to intrinsic value. ... Unqualified judgment can at most claim to decide the market-value - a value that can be in inverse….

If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art..

Lucidity is the first purpose of color in music..

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education..

Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one's head, and finds it still there on waking….

I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes..

Rests always sound well..

Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas..