Music begins where words are powerless to express. Music is made for the inexpressible. I want music to seem to rise from the shadows and indeed sometimes to return to them.
But music, don’t you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It’s not even the expression of a feeling, it’s the feeling itself.
Art is the most beautiful of all lies.
Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.
A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.
There is nothing is more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little – the book of Nature.
Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.
If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.
I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.
I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms.
To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.
How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.
Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.
Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
Collect impressions. Don’t be in a hurry to write them down. Because that’s something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.
It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music to seek oblivion.
Anyone who calls my music “impressionist” is an imbecile.