All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.

It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.

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.

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.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

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