I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.

What force is more potent than love?

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.

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.

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.

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.

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

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.

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.

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

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

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

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.

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

The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

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

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed and as we are already flying pilotless on instrument controls it is even too late to ask where we are going.

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

A good composer does not imitate he steals.

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.

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!