A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

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 anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.

The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.

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

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

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

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.

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

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.

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

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

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

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.

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 ending.

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 he will do.