To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.

Tradition is laziness.

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

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

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.

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

Behind me the branches of a wasted and sterile existence are cracking.