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.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

One’s belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one’s conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren’t always right.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa Lobos?

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.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators...

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one.

Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.

It’s one of nature’s way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.