“Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.”

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.

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

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.