The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one
What force is more potent than love?
My music is best understood by children and animals.
I am an inventor of music.
Revolution means turning the wheel.
To continue in one path is to go backward.
The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.
The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.
I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
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 certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.
I live neither in the past nor in the future. 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.
To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.
I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.
What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.
The profound meaning of music's essential aim... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being
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 the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.
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.
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.
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.
An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.
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.
We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.
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