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

Improvisation is terribly haphazard.

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.

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

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

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.

I distrust anything that you don't hear.

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

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

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

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

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

I love language, and I love the failure of language.

If any thing can be predicated as universally true of uncultivated man, it is that he will not labour beyond what is absolutely necessary to maintain his existence.

Are you willing to increase the amount of time every day that you feel good inside?

I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me

In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.

Nobody is strong 100 percent of the time, or falling apart 100 percent of the time; sometimes you're doing both at once.

I don't know if human activity is the only cause, but mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face, we have in a sense taken over nature.

A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city.

I got fined for talking to myself.