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.
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.
Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.
The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.
There is nothing more musical than a sunset.
The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly.
There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.
In opera, there is always too much singing.
The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.
Extreme complication is contrary to art.
First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
What I am trying to do is something different an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don’t hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.
The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.
He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting.
Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary...
Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes.
Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ .