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

Please don't try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have -- I want it that way.

Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone's. The meaning of 'God' may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world

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

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'

For the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considerd with his devotion to his art.

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