I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.

But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.

There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.

Music begins where words are powerless to express. Music is made for the inexpressible. I want music to seem to rise from the shadows and indeed sometimes to return to them.

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all! And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.