Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.

When I discovered that I had been made custodian of this gift, in my earliest childhood, I pledged myself to God to be worthy of it, but I have received uncovenanted mercies all my life. The custodian has too often kept faith on his all-too-worldly terms.

I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.

The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.