Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

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

I am an inventor of music.

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.

Composers combine notes, that's all.

Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.