Answer them critics with silence and indifference. It works better, I assure you, than anger and argument. . . .

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind.

The language of music is common to all generations and nations; it is understood by everybody, since it is understood with the heart.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.

Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity.

Beethoven I take twice a week, Haydn four times, and Mozart every day.

Music is a kind of harmonious language.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge.

Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair.

If Beethoven is a prodigy of man, Bach is a miracle of God.

To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever or you did not love them that much.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.

For my own personal growth I had to set out on my own.

Ah, but I am more perceptive than most of the universe. Especially the parts of the universe that are vacuum.

I have been reading the press more regularly than others over 50 years and it seems to me that there are things that have changed in the press that have changed its character.

If we are attacked we can only defend ourselves with guns not with butter.

my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender

I thought it was against the law for a woman to solicit.

I was beaten up wherever I went, and people shouted at me and cursed me and threw things at me.