“Football is the ballet of the masses.”

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.

I write music, it’s performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn’t need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.

The best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much perish. You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear. There’s more of a chance then that they’ll survive.

Remember, weapons of mass destruction don’t mean missiles.

It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.

And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction.

I’m not really a mass market writer.

The younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses . . . Each generation . . . will have its creed.

The mass market eventually assimilates that which is innovative or revolutionary.

Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights.

The American mass media have achieved what American political might could not: World domination.