The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It's useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

I hope my recordings of my own works won't inhibit other people's performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn't always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

Arthur V. Berger commenting on the music of Aaron Copland: Here is at last an American that we may place unapologetically beside the great recognized creative figures of any other country.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.