Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.

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

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

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

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

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.

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.