Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
He was a six and a half foot scowl.(on Rachmaninov)
What force is more potent than love?
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
Old age is a time of humiliations the most disagreeable of which for me is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.
Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
Childhood - a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.
Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.
The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.
One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.
I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve.
I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thou...
I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.
A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been...
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.