The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.

I was...attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing "simple" music, blamed for deserting "modernism," accused of renouncing my "true Russian heritage." People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried "sacrilege": "The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone." To them all my answer was and is the same: You "respect," but I love.

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

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

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

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.