Beware of losing what isn't in your head.

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue.

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.

Why do you not do as I do? Letting go of your thoughts as though they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire?

The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.