“I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.”

A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.

Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.

Composition is frozen improvisation.

I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk!

To continue in one path is to go backward.

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.

Good composers don’t borrow, they steal.

My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.

The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is.

It’s one of nature’s way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.