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 relegation.

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

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

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

It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.

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 family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

It is one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.

Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.

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.

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.