I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk!

It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.

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.

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

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

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

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.