A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
|
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 known to die from stares.
|
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.
|
Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
|
I am an inventor of music.
|
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.
|
I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
|
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
|
In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?
|
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
|
It's one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.
|
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
|
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
|
My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
|
My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.
|
My music is best understood by children and animals.
|
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
|
Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.
|
Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.
|
The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.
|
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.
|
The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.
|
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.
|
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
|
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
|
What force is more potent than love?
|
When I discovered that I had been made custodian of this gift, in my earliest childhood, I pledged myself to God to be worthy of it, but I have received uncovenanted mercies all my life. The custodian has too often kept faith on his all-too-worldly terms.
|
