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

Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.

Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy. My music is best understood by children and animals.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa Lobos?

A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.

Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.

Composition is frozen improvisation.

I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk!

To continue in one path is to go backward.

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.