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

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

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.

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

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.

Good composers don't borrow, they steal

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