We do not hear what we hear..., only what we remember.

Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

At one point [Cardew] taught himself to play guitar simply in order to take part in the performance in a composition by Boulez, which is a little like saying he learned Danish to read Kiekegaard.

To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?

No one has the Houdini school of composition.

What was great about the 50s is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art.

The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others