“What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.”

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

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.

Composition is selective improvisation.

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.

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.

Fathers and mothers, do not forget that children learn more by the eye than they do by the ear… Imitation is a far stronger principle with children than memory. What they see has a much stronger effect on their minds than what they are told.

Study the habits of the people you want to be like and then imitate them. If they are succeeding, they must be doing something right.

We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.

I don’t think imitation is the highest form of flattery, I think it’s annoying.

The real champions in life are so humble and gracious. They just continue doing what they do without all the posturing. If you’ve got the real thing, you don’t have to flaunt a loud imitation.

Since God made us originals, why stoop to be imitations.

The first thing about the angels that we ought to imitate, is their consciousness of the Presence of God.

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.