Pierre Boulez Quotes

All art of the past must be destroyed.

We have to fight the past to survive.

The aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music.

It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.

Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent 'discovering' rather like the state of 'permanent revolution'.

We need to restore the spirit of irreverence in music.

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.

I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed.

Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary.

The function of pop music is to be consumed.

For me, curiosity is life. If you are not curious, you are in your coffin.

Music should be a collective magic and hysteria.

I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography.

More and more I find that in order to create effectively one has to consider delirium and, yes, organize it.