Pierre Boulez Quotes

Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, full of new paths to discover, where mystery remains eternal

Any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.

It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.

For me, curiosity is life. If you are not curious, you are in your coffin.

More and more I find that in order to create effectively one has to consider delirium and, yes, organize it.

The aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music.

Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent 'discovering' rather like the state of 'permanent revolution'.

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.

Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary.

I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed.

We have to fight the past to survive.

All art of the past must be destroyed.

We need to restore the spirit of irreverence in music.

Music should be a collective magic and hysteria.

The function of pop music is to be consumed.

I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography.