Well, no. I believe that it's not at all impossible that some of the performances that I've heard so far by some pianists may be superior to my own playing because those are two totally different acts altogether.

Improvisation is terribly haphazard.

Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing.

The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get.

Today, with a recording, he can hear the thing enough times until he really gets acquainted with the language, and then he can begin to make an estimate of the intrinsic, aesthetic value of that piece of music.

To the person that deals in visualizations, I suppose there is something rather exciting about a whole set of people - they all going symmetrically, up or down, in a military sort of precision.

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

A person improvising is sometimes very fortunate that just at that second things coincide.

I'm really interested in writing a piece of music that will move you, that will really move you. That is really the only reason that I'm writing music.

I think there have been some periods when the writing almost became a bit of a burden.

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.

You write it down because finally, when it's written down you do get it out of your system somewhat.

Hopefully, I have a certain amount of what you call musical talent.

I distrust anything that you don't hear.

By the visual pattern, but mostly I'm guided entirely by my ear, what I hear.

We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising.

But in the end, music is ultimately an aural art, pure and simple.

Because essentially Schoenberg was an extremely gifted man. And in spite of many of his theories and so on, when he really began to write music, he still was guided very much by his internal hearing, by what we call your internal ear.

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know.

When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there.

In writing music, the structure of each piece is a very important factor.

Well, no. I believe that it's not at all impossible that some of the performances that I've heard so far by some pianists may be superior to my own playing because those are two totally different acts altogether.

Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided.

Now, what we are not talking about, what you're really coming to, is what compromises one makes so that the listener understands somewhat of what you're doing, what you're trying to express.

The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment.

There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

It doesnt necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don't believe too much into inspiration, only I'm waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It's a little too easy to say that.

When families observe a later, deeper stage of cult involvement they may find it necessary to consider the involvement of a professional such as myself in an intervention effort.

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Some gods may cross your path, but why should gods be beautiful? They could also be frightening.

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.