The future of music may not lie entirely in music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and dreams of.

Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?

One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was, first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife

I don't write music for sissy ears.

An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly . . . A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity

Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.