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

The past slips from our grasp. It leaves us only scattered things. The bond that united them eludes us. Our imagination usually fills in the void by making use of preconceived theories...Archaeology, then, does not supply us with certitudes, but rather with vague hypotheses. And in the shade of these hypotheses some artists are content to dream, considering them less as scientific facts than as sources of inspiration.

A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.

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.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

I am an inventor of music.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one