The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion.

I dream of a collaboration that will become so complete that, often, the poet will think as musician and the musician as poet, so that the work resulting from this union will not be the random conclusion of a series of approximations and concessions, but the harmonious synthesis of two aspects of the same thought.

Composing is not a profession. It is a maniaa harmless madness.

Music is geometry in time.

The modern composer is a madman who persists in manufacturing an article which nobody wants.

The public doesn't want new music the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead.