Arnold Schoenberg quotes:

I owe very, very much to Mozart; and if one studies, for instance, the way in which I write for string quartet, then one cannot deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart. And I am proud of it!

I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words.

Market value is irrelevant to intrinsic value. ... Unqualified judgment can at most claim to decide the market-value - a value that can be in inverse proportion to the intrinsic value.

You cannot expect the Form before the Idea,For they will come into being together.

Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one's head, and finds it still there on waking up the next morning.

The principal function of form is to advance our understanding. It is the organization of a piece which helps the listener to keep the idea in mind, to follow its development, its growth, its elaboration, its fate.

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pearsâ?¦

Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.

Lucidity is the first purpose of color in music.

In Spring! In the creation of art it must be as it is in Spring!

I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!

Rests always sound well.

If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.

My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers.

My music is not modern, it is merely badly played

Great art presupposes the alert mind of the educated listener

My music is not lovely

I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.

An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind-not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.

Although our "gentle air" cannot improve the way hate and envy look, it does seem not to encourage firmness and decision. All is compromise; caution and refinement are everywhere. Everything has to "make a good impression" - whether or not it is any good: the impression is the main thing.

There are no more geniuses, only critics.