Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.

On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly

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

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.

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.

First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.

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