“If the question [about if there were only one composer in the world I could play] is purely ‘original’ works, no transcriptions, then Beethoven.”
https://www.pianistmagazine.com/News-and-Features/161/Exclusive_interview_with_pianist_Valentina_Lisitsa/
You make your mistakes to learn how to get to the good stuff.
They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.
— John Cage speaking about the premiere of 4′33″
Kostelanetz 2003, p. 70
Claude Debussy: “Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.”
https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/latest/inspiring-composer-quotes/
What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.
— Ludwig van Beethoven
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/search_results?q=Beethoven
“I would much rather have my piece played as a sandwich in between Haydn and Beethoven or Brahms and Stravinsky than between Mary Jane and John Doe … we’re writing music in a tradition, not the tradition, but a tradition,”
— Samuel Adler
SAMUEL ADLER: KNOWING WHAT YOU’RE DOING – New Music USA | https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/samuel-adler-knowing-what-youre-doing/
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
— John Cage
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/john_cage_102966
You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down… some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.
– Aaron Copland
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/search_results?q=Aaron+Copland
I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.
Edgard Varese
goodhueas.com 
