We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.

Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.

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.

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

When I discovered that I had been made custodian of this gift, in my earliest childhood, I pledged myself to God to be worthy of it, but I have received uncovenanted mercies all my life. The custodian has too often kept faith on his all-too-worldly terms.

I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk!

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