I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

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.

I never understood the need for a "live" audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.