Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding.
Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do.
A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance.
For better or for worse, in 'The Last Savage,' I have dared to do away completely with fashionable dissonance, and in a modest way, I have endeavored to rediscover the nobility of gracefulness and the pleasure of sweetness.
Waiting and hoping are the whole of life, and as soon as a dream is realized it is destroyed.
The only thing that interests me in music is to be able to reach into the, let's call it, 'collective unconscious' of what is noblest in the human spirit, the way you find in the music of Mozart and Beethoven and Verdi that wonderful quality that not a note can be changed.
I should have worked harder in my life. I suffer from a guilt complex.
The Italians are very unmusical. If I go to a Protestant church in London or Amsterdam or listen to a black choir, I hear four-part harmony. Italians could never do that. In Italy, we all have to sing the melody because we cannot harmonise.
There are three reasons why I live in Scotland. First, I like silence, and you have to be a millionaire to buy silence in Italy. Second, I like cold weather. Third, in Italy I have too many relatives and know too many people, so I never get a quiet time.
I thought conceptual art was a joke.
I can sit on a chair with a score and give myself a wonderful performance.
Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.
Melody is a form of remembrance. It must have a quality of inevitability in our ears.
People ask me whether I'm religious. Well, in a certain way, I am.
I loathe my body. The liver spots, the sagging flesh.
One lived in the impression that nobody could ever compete with the 'Nutcracker' or 'A Christmas Carol.'
Writing beautiful melodies is not fashionable because it is very difficult to do.
God gives you the gift of melody or He doesn't - it's as simple as that.
I really don't think I have that much of the gift; I have a little bit, but I wish I were Schubert or Chopin or Beethoven, though Beethoven had a very difficult time writing melody, too.
It takes a Bobby White to make a tired 90-year-old composer write a song about love.
