What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure.

What are our conductors giving us year after year? Only fresh corpses. Over these beautifully embalmed sonatas, toccatas, symphonies and operas the public dance the jitterbug. Night and day without let the radio drowns us in a hog-wash of the most nauseating, sentimental ditties. From the churches comes the melancholy dirge of the dead Christ, a music which is no more sacred than a rotten turnip.

There is something else to be said about this immediate, spontaneous way of working, and that is this: in such moments, one is playing at the game of creation.

Day by day. No yesterdays and no tomorrows. The barometer never changes, the flag is always at half-mast.

I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.

If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist, it is because I want to laugh more. I don't say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you've got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God. My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That's why it doesn't matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.