- I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
- Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?
- My music is best understood by children and animals.
- To listen is an effort and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
- The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music. They should be taught to love it instead.
- Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
- [George] Gershwin is supposed to have come to me in Paris and to have asked me how much I would charge to give him lessons. I am then supposed to have asked how much he earned, and after he had supposedly said $100,000 a year, my supposed reply was, 'Then I should take lessons from you'. A nice story, but I heard it about myself from Ravel before I met Gershwin.
- My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
- Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration. It is the Church's greatest ornament.
- I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
- Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
- My music is cheap. It's my name that's expensive.
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