“One’s belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one’s conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren’t always right.”

We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

I am an inventor of music.

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.

The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I make music from music.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one.

Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.

What force is more potent than love?

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.

Music is the coordination between man and time.

The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.

We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.