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.

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

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 believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series.

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

I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.

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