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.

One's belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one's conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren't always right.

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

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

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

My music is best understood by children and animals.

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.

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

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.

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