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

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.

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.

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

You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

The main characteristic which is the proof of the indwelling Spirit is an amazing tenderness in personal dealing, and a blazing truthfulness with regard to God’s Word.

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

The simple part is, every thought we think and every word we speak is creating our future. If you change your thinking, you can change your life.

Yankees don’t understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.

The only stupid thing about words is the spelling of them.

Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected, in this case I would think interesting would suffice.

Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.