Look at everything. Don’t close your eyes to the world around you. Look and become curious and interested in what there is to see.
When you make music you are acting as a philosopher. You can either do that consciously or you can do it unconsciously, but you’re doing it.
When I went to the analyst for a kind of preliminary meeting, he said, ‘I’ll be able to fix you so that you’ll write much more music than you do now.’ I said, ‘Good heavens! I already write too much, it seems to me.’ That promise of his put me off.
You can feel an emotion; just don’t think that it’s so important.
In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.
The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.
There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
My favourite music is the music I haven’t yet heard. I don’t hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven’t yet heard.
Some people take music too seriously, and some don’t take it seriously enough, others take it just right...
Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.
Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.
A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
We are not committed to this or that. We are committed to the nothing in-between, whether we know it or not.
I needed another basis for musical structure. This I found in sound’s duration parameter, sound’s only parameter which is present even when no sound is intended.
If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.
So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we’re overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We’ve gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?
We only hear what we listen for.
Beware of losing what isn’t in your head.