I believe that the only excuse we have for being musicians and for making music in any fashion, is to make it differently, to perform it differently, to establish the music's difference, vis-a-vis our own difference.

The nature of the contrapuntal experience is that every note has to have a past and a future on the horizontal plane.

[Bach is the] reason I became a musician

The final, unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue is the greatest piece of music ever composed.

I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.

My moods are inversely related to the clarity of the sky.

Mozart died too late rather than too soon.