“My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.”

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.

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

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

I am an inventor of music.

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.

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.

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.

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?

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.

Death is just a comma to a Christian, not a period.

Nothing juices me up creatively like being in my own studio for an extended period.

The authors I prefer are all very different and are not limited to certain genres or even certain time periods.

Unless action is taken soon – unless we can display the same vision of that earlier period – we will lose the treasure of California’s open space and environmental beauty.

I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can’t not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops.

Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.

At no period of [Michael Faraday’s] unmatched career was he interested in utility.