“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.”

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.

The performance has developed to such an extent in recent years that it challenges the music itself and will soon threaten it with relegation.

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.

On a clear day, how it will astound you That the glow of your feelings outshines every star.

I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating.

On a clear day, rise and look around you, and you’ll see who you are.

He deeper and more staggering can be his collapse. There is never a day in any man’s life but that he is dependent upon the grace of God for power and the blood of Jesus for cleansing.

I’m always afraid someone’s going to tap me on the shoulder one day and say, ‘Back to North London’.

One day you meet someone and for some inexplicable reason, you feel more connected to this stranger than anyone else.

Review your goals twice every day in order to be focused on achieving them.

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.