Composers combine notes, that's all.

What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.

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.

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

We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.

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

The profound meaning of music's essential aim... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being