It should be one’s sole endeavor to see everything afresh and create it anew.

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.

I also had a brother who was like me a musician and a composer. A man of great talent, far more gifted than I. He died very young... he killed himself in the prime of his life.

The longer you live and the more you learn, the more clearly you will feel the difference between the few men who are truly great and the mere virtuosi.

It's not just a question of conquering a summit previously unknown, but of tracing, step by step, a new pathway to it.

In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience.

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