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.

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous may happen.

There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature.

Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.

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

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.