To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

One's belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one's conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren't always right.

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

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.