I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.

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

The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is.

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.

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