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

Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.

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.

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

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.

I believe in people. I feel, love, need and respect people above all else, including natural scenery, organized piety and nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of a mountain can make the mountain disappear for me, one person fighting for truth can disqualify for me the entire system which had dispensed it.

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