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.

The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.

The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.

To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough.

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

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

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