When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost.

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.

It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

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