Sounds and ideas are hanging in the air;I am devouring them and stuffing myself.A comment he wrote after viewing an exhibition of Viktor Hartmann's drawings and paintings which inspired his suite Pictures at an Exhibition

I regard the people as a great being, inspired by a single idea. This is my problem. I strove to solve it in this opera.

In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.

My music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. That is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thou…

If you're working with words, it's got to be poetry. I grew up with Kerouac. If he hadn't wrote On The Road, the Doors would have never existed. Morrison read …

I heard the music, and I wrote to it. Some people beat drums. Some people strum guitars. It's all in the music you hear.

That's a song where we were listening to a lot of Kate Bush last summer, and we wanted a song which had a lot of tom-toms in it,I just had my daughter up also,…