You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.

Fortunately, something always remains to be harvested. So let us not be idle.

A true personality . . . is like a robust organism that, with unconscious sureness, seeks out and digests the nourishment appropriate to it and vigorously rejects that which is unsuitable.

There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment.

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.