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

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one

Music is...the coordination between man and time.

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.

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

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

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