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.

Silence, which will save from shame, will also deprive me of fame.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

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

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

Music is...the coordination between man and time.

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.