When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic - here on Sixth Avenue, for instance - I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound... I don’t need sound to talk to me.

All great art is a form of complaint

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

When you make music you are acting as a philosopher. You can either do that consciously or you can do it unconsciously, but you're doing it.

A mind that is interested in changing...is interested precisely in the things that are at extremes. I'm certainly like that. Unless we go to extremes, we won't get anywhere.

Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music is a celebration that we own nothing.

Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.