Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.

Composition is frozen improvisation.

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.

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

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.