“It [music] is the nourishment for my joy to live.”

“Spring Music,” 34
Circling: 1978-1987 (1993), Sequence: “A Conversations with Atoms”

1920s, Viereck interview (1929)

Edward Elgar, in a letter to German (1924)

Interview by Jonathan Robinson (1994)

What Is A Jazz Composer? (1971)
Context: Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. Not noise. My children! You do what you want with your own!

Second Week, Fourth Day, Book ii. Compare: "My fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world", William Shakespeare, King John, act iii. sc. 4.
La Seconde Semaine (1584)

Letter to Giovanni Boccaccio (28 April 1373) as quoted in Petrarch : The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (1898) edited by James Harvey Robinson and Henry Winchester Rolfe, p. 426
Context: Continued work and application form my soul's nourishment. So soon as I commenced to rest and relax I should cease to live. I know my own powers. I am not fitted for other kinds of work, but my reading and writing, which you would have me discontinue, are easy tasks, nay, they are a delightful rest, and relieve the burden of heavier anxieties. There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other pleasures fail us or wound us while they charm, but the pen we take up rejoicing and lay down with satisfaction, for it has the power to advantage not only its lord and master, but many others as well, even though they be far away — sometimes, indeed, though they be not born for thousands of years to come. I believe I speak but the strict truth when I claim that as there is none among earthly delights more noble than literature, so there is none so lasting, none gentler, or more faithful; there is none which accompanies its possessor through the vicissitudes of life at so small a cost of effort or anxiety.