I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it..

The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I….

Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy. My music is best understood by children and animals..

When I discovered that I had been made custodian of this gift, in my earliest childhood, I pledged myself to God to be worthy of it, but I have recei….

I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received..

Composition is selective improvisation..

A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible..

Revolution means turning the wheel..

What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance..

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead..

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor..

The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation..

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth..

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?.

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too lat….

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles….

My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey..

A good composer does not imitate; he steals..

I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a cert….

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune..

Music is...the coordination between man and time..