No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.

A person improvising is sometimes very fortunate that just at that second things coincide.

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.

But in the end, music is ultimately an aural art, pure and simple.

Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided.

When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there.

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There’s no specific line, as you know.