The Church knew what the psalmist knew: 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.

Conductors’ careers are made for the most part with ‘Romantic’ music. ‘Classic’ music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

The Church knew what the psalmist knew: 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.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

I am an inventor of music.

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.

What force is more potent than love?

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

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.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa-Lobos?

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.