“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.”

What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.

It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.

Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.

To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.

Silence, which will save from shame, will also deprive me of fame.

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.

Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.

I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

Composers combine notes, that’s all.

Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.