“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”

“Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”

“This will be our reply to violence:to make music more intensely,more beautifully,more devotedly than ever before.”

“Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.”

“The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... ...”

“I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.”