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.

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

I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.

Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives.

Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

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