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.

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

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

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

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

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

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.