Arthur Honegger

“My model is always Bach. He is the greatest of them all.”

“The first thing to be done, in music, is to be a musician.”

“My desire is to write music that is comprehensible to the great mass of listeners and at the same time is sufficiently free of banality to interest the connoisseur.”

“I have always had a taste for the architecture of music.”

“The public does not have the score in front of it. It doesn't see the music. It hears it.”

“I attach great importance to the melodic line, which must be supple and generous.”

“I have always loved locomotives. For me they are living things and I love them as others love women or horses.”

“To write music is to raise a building. It has to be solid.”

“I sincerely think that a composer should write for his own time.”