Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire..

To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free. That w….

Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians..

If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost..

I have a very dear friend, a great painter, called me up very upset, the work wasn’t going well… He asked me to come to his studio -- which I did -- ….

After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles..

Music can imply the infinite if enough things depart from the norm far enough. Strange "abnormal" events can lead to the feeling that anything can ha….

It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. The….

Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures..

Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon..

The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection..

At one point [Cardew] taught himself to play guitar simply in order to take part in the performance in a composition by Boulez, which is a little lik….

For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person ….

For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart..

What was great about the 50s is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art..

I never understood what rules I was supposed to learn, and what rules I was supposed to break.

Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is….

To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?.

Do we have anything in music that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?.

The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than ano….

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for t….