A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes", And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be "No."

Someone once asked me... whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: "Every day!"

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

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

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.