Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

There is nothing more musical than a sunset.

But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.

Music is the space between the notes.

Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

Music begins where words are powerless to express. Music is made for the inexpressible. I want music to seem to rise from the shadows and indeed sometimes to return to them.

Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.

[on Richard Wagner] A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms.

Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.

I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.

Can really anybody put his hand on his heart and profess to know beyond doubt what happens on the other side of this life?

Love is the secret password to every soul.

When you get as lucky as I got, you have to work as hard as possible to earn that luck.

Why do villains have so much influence? Because the honest people are terribly dense.

How can you say you want to be somewhere when you're not really sure if they want you there because they're not even talking to you?

Black people don't have an accurate idea of their history, which has been either suppressed or distorted.

I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.

Each of us has a universal within us. There's always that making of parts - but it doesn't touch the universal within you.

No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.

Be joyful because it is humanly possible.