Music is one of the ways that God has of beating in on man.

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized

Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.

Please don't try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have -- I want it that way.

Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

I don't write music for sissy ears.

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.

But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?

Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?

There was an electric buzzing sound that was constantly on, acting as background music like a million cicadas in the forest. A constant white noise.

This is what aesthetics, development and progress depend upon: that we go out on thin ice.

I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that in fact were innocent.

What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.

Those who commit the murders write the reports.

What is truer than truth? Answer: the story.

I am talking about misery and all of its implications.

Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.

I do not criticize religion as such, but I criticize the concept and the definition of "religion" - as I said in Genealogies.