Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right..

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, wh….

Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself..

The past slips from our grasp. It leaves us only scattered things. The bond that united them eludes us. Our imagination usually fills in the void by ….

The performance of performance has developed to such an extent in recent years that it challenges the music itself and will soon threaten it with rel….

My music is best understood by children and animals..

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators..

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

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….

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 ….

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….

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….

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

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

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….

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..

I am an inventor of music..

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….

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