“The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.”

The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I make music from music.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one.

Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.

What force is more potent than love?

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.

Music is the coordination between man and time.

We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.

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

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.

Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.

They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.

I guess we all understand the love language fine; but maybe truth is we’re just too fluent in goodbyes.

Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.

There’s never an end for the sea.

He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.

In England, one without a trace of Royalty will master. Twenty months he will rule; twenty months he will bleed the lands, then his end comes quickly.