Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.

I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.

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.

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