Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos.

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.

The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.

But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.

I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.

If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster.

In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience.

I think of drug dealers like I think of my father— never really there when you want them to be.

Outside the hospital, I squinted in the harsh morning sunlight. I could hear birds chirping in the tree, but even though I searched for them, they remained hidden from me.

There is something about fashion that can make people really nervous.

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.

Only heart to heart can speak the bliss of mystic knowers.

'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.

You're trying your damndest, you strike out and they boo you. I act like it doesn't bother me, like I don't hear anything the fans say, but the truth is I hear every word of it and it kills me.

True vision is the ability to see in another more than they are showing you.

I moved to Chicago in 1980 to go to college

Many people don't give a rip about politics and know as much about public affairs as they know about the topography of Pluto.