Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm

Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.

You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.

I have two answers to everything and one answer to nothing.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.