“Football is the ballet of the masses.”

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.

The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.

Today the mass of the people are uninformed even as to ordinary affairs, how much less do they grasp the core of the important problems and complex needs of the time.

I cannot be made into the commentator for the unspoken black masses.

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.

When the masses begin to vibrate with an energy of love, the world will no longer be a container for war, violence, and lies.

The masses need something that will give them a thrill of horror.

Self-actualized people…live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.

Youth should learn to think and act as a mass. It is criminal to think as individuals!