How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.

If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.

[on Richard Wagner] A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms.

The sound of the sea, the curve of a horizon, wind in leaves, the cry of a bird leave manifold impression in us. And suddenly, without our wishing it at all, one of these memories spills from us and finds expression in musical language...I want to sing my interior landscape with the simple artlessness of a child.

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

He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting.