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.

Life without music is unthinkable.

Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

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

Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff

Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.