Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!

The only love affair I have ever had was with music.

Why become a second-rate Ravel when you're already a first-rate Gershwin?

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces.

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art

I do not ask for my music to be interpreted, but only for it to be played.

I begin by considering an effect.

You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.

If he'd been making shell-cases during the war it might have been better for music.

To George Gershwin, on refusinghim as a pupil: You would only lose the spontaneous quality of your melody, and end by writing bad Ravel.

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all.

Sometimes bad things that come in life aren’t necessarily bad things

Machinery which is not used is not capital.

Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous.

It's a new phenomenon in America that states can now sue the national government and become a kind of check and balance on the excesses of the federal government.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.

To the modern spirit, disillusioned, or at least unillusioned, the great evil to be avoided is sentimentality.

It shows the truth - that the real meaning of a word is only as powerful or harmless as the emotion behind it.