“The performance has developed to such an extent in recent years that it challenges the music itself and will soon threaten it with relegation.”

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

Composition is selective improvisation.

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.

Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.

Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy. My music is best understood by children and animals.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa Lobos?

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.

Workers’ rights should be a central focus of development.

In developing countries, lack of infrastructure is a far more serious barrier to trade than tariffs.

It takes years to develop into the kind of human being you want to be.

We have actively worked to share our experience of development with other nations, especially in Asia.

Democracy is an internal subject of the developing society.

We need others. We need others to love and we need to be loved by them. There is no doubt that without it, we too like the infant left alone, would cease to grow, cease to develop, choose madness, and even death.

Japan will finally open a new page for lunar exploration and space development.

Democracy cannot be exported to some other place. This must be a product of internal domestic development in a society.