After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles.

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

It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.

Do we have anything in music that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?

I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country

I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory!

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