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

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

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.