The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.

Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.

I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.

It looks wrong, and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is wrong and arises from insular ignorance.

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.

The great men of music close periods they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than Die Meister Singer of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.