The word 'beauty' is as easy to use as the word 'degenerate.' Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.

My God! What has sound got to do with music?

Every great inspiration is but an experiment.

If idioms are more to be born than to be selected, then the things of life and human nature that a man has grown up with--(not that one man's experience is better than another's, but that it is 'his.')--may give him something better in his substance and manner than an over-long period of superimposed idiomatic education which quite likely doesn't fit his constitution. My father used to say, 'If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven'

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

In 'thinking up' music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.