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.

Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.

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

To continue in one path is to go backward.

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.

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.