But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.

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

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.

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

In opera, there is always too much singing.

He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting.

Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.