“I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible; and if I don’t succeed, I consider it my own fault.”

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.

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

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.

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.

Fury made a name for himself in America, and as a fighter, you have to establish yourself there, first and foremost, to be known worldwide.

Life is so much bigger, grander, higher, and wider than we allow ourselves to think.

Keep your mind open, your spirit wide and loose, the heart warm and kind.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

I closed a lot of doors, that used to be wide open. Bolted them shut so you couldn’t break them down again.

A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held.

Every time there are losses, there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper.

Most people search high and wide for the key to success. If they only knew, the key to their dreams lies within.