“I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.”

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.

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.

You have it in your power to make your days on Earth a path of flowers, instead of a path of thorns.

Before anyone else, women need to accept that neither does life stop, nor does it change for those few days in a month.

The first trip of the Pony Express was made in ten days – an average of two hundred miles a day. But we soon began stretching our riders and making better time.

I just lead my life as naturally, as normally as I possibly can. But I can’t help it if controversy is hounding me day in and day out. I’m quite amazed sometimes by the way they go about it. I grow a beard and it lands up in the editorial in The Times of India.

If you do what you love, you will never have to work a day in your life.

We all have experiences in our lives that change us, and we all learn from people, like my dad, but at the end of the day, it’s only us. And we’re only responsible to make ourselves happy.

There are days when I go out on the court and I feel like I can’t miss a ball.

Your mindset is responsible for all that you experience throughout the day.