The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.

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

Life is the space between our things.

I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns.

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.