Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.

I never understood the need for a "live" audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

Music is...the coordination between man and time.

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.