What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out.

All music has to speak in some form or other.

Within each individual young person you meet, you have the same fields to plough. The trick is just to wake them up, to sharpen their ears for what's already there in the music.

With creative people, truly new horizons open up.

In Romanticism, the main determinant is the mood, the atmosphere. And in that regard, you could also describe Schubert as a Romantic.

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.

Unfortunately, it happens all too seldom that you really disappear behind a work, that you are no longer audible as an interpreter.

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.

Toward the end of his life, one can sense that he was no longer thinking his way into the minds of others, causing them to speak on his behalf, but that he was now speaking for himself.

The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem's overall form.

But the thing that will always occupy me the most is music.

In this world

Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.

In the days approaching Christmas, she always reminds me of the previous year: 'Jane crocheted you an entire poncho, and all you gave her was a bone-shaped beach stone.

Perhaps, I myself am the enemy who needs to be loved.

Nirvana is the other side, the source of all things, where all the aggregates come from, where the templates of infinity are.

At the bottom of things, most people want to be understood and appreciated.

Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

Those dogs of democrats and liberal riff-raff will see that we're the only chaps who haven't been stultified by the ghastly period of peace.

Some struggling marriages can be salvaged with hard work and counseling; others should be dismantled and stripped for parts.

I have long felt that the way to keep children out of trouble is to keep them interested in things.