The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution..

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?.

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymi….

Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it..

Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whos….

Hurry? I have no time to hurry..

Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3..

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what h….

I was...attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing "simple" music, blamed for deserting "modernism," accused of renouncing my "true Russia….

Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also..

I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one..

I am an inventor of music..

The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ….

It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-realit….

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell..

I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting ….

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself..

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street any more without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal fami….

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time..

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators..

All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose..