To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.
The impressions of the spriritual experiences gave my future life its form and content.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
To write a symphony is, for me, to construct a world.
But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.
What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.