Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time... Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can't tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything.

The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.

People don't very much like things that are beautiful - they are so far from their nasty little minds.

I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns.

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?