There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.

I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.

Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

Have we not all about us forms of a musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art?.