Composition is frozen improvisation.

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.

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

I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.

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.