A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street any more without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

One's belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one's conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren't always right.

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

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

I was...attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing "simple" music, blamed for deserting "modernism," accused of renouncing my "true Russian heritage." People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried "sacrilege": "The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone." To them all my answer was and is the same: You "respect," but I love.

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

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.