I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.

The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough.

It looks wrong, and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.

I rely on a backbone of books and, for the most part, it's enough to keep me quiet, half-drugged with dreams of imaginary worlds.

Magician is the best storyteller in the world.

They kind of go hand-in-hand. Following your motivation, resting when you need to rest, and going for it when you feel inspired.

The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.

Words command us. Names define us. Definitions bind us. Words are where we keep our sacred secrets.

You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.

Democracy is never a final achievement. It is a call to an untiring effort.

There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.

No matter the good news anywhere else, these nuke-hungry rogue states will provide grounds for bad-mouthing Bush foreign policy.