“If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.”

It’s about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.

He fell like a chicken into the soup.

Those who have ears to hear, will hear.

In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.

Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.

I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin’s orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death.

Every piece of music is a form of personal expression for its creator. If a work doesn’t express the composers own personal point of view, his own ideas, then it doesn’t, in my opinion, even deserve to be born.

I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible; and if I don’t succeed, I consider it my own fault.

A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.

I don’t know what will become of this piece. Our brave critics will no doubt charge me with imitating Ravel’s Bolero. Too bad – this is how I hear war.

What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn’t laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in “serious” music.

A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed.

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!

What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.

May God keep you away from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the revenge of the Afghans.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

In my teeth is all I want sheet music which is so weird and cool.

If we do an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we will be a blind and toothless nation.

Behind every smile there’s teeth.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say My tooth is aching than to say “My heart is broken.