Artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.

Rhythm is something you either have or don't have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

Comedy is the blues for people who can?t sing.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Once you become predictable, no one's interested anymore.

One thing that really appeals to me is this idea of music being a living thing that has an evolution that, in a way, enables the artist to sell a process rather than a piece of product.

Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.

Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.

People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best; for that we must have recourse to art.