Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.

Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one's head, and finds it still there on waking up the next morning.

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.

You cannot expect the Form before the Idea,For they will come into being together.

The principal function of form is to advance our understanding. It is the organization of a piece which helps the listener to keep the idea in mind, to follow its development, its growth, its elaboration, its fate.

I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.

I owe very, very much to Mozart; and if one studies, for instance, the way in which I write for string quartet, then one cannot deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart. And I am proud of it!