There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.

If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.

Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one's head, and finds it still there on waking up the next morning.

I find above all that the expression, atonal music, is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying the art of not falling, or swimming the art of not drowning.

My music is not modern, it is merely badly played

My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers.

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.

Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears.

You cannot expect the Form before the Idea,For they will come into being together.

My music is not lovely.

We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.

Writers wake up the world.

You have to decide what you want in life and pursue what you want with all your heart.

I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.

A man's penmanship is an unfailing index of his character, moral and mental, and a criterion by which to judge his peculiarities of taste and sentiments.

Freedom is much more complicated than servitude.

The right attitude toward any negative state begins with understanding that its only authority over you is a direct reflection of your attitude towards it.

I don't talk about myself in the third person, and I laugh at people who do.

Don't corral me, and I'll always come home. Just let me go out and play during the day.

I dote on his very absence.