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

Silence, which will save from shame, will also deprive me of fame.

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.

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street any more without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.

Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.

The profound meaning of music's essential aim... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being