My piano is to me what a ship is to the sailor, what a steed is to the Arab. It is the intimate personal depository of everything that stirred wildly in my brain during the most impassioned days of my youth. It was there that all my wishes, all my dreams, all my joys, and all my sorrows lay.

In the oldest chronicles of the times conserved in Hungary, reports will be found of Gypsy music, but never of any other, either Magyar, Slavic or Jewish.

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.

When you write the story of two happy lovers, let the story be set on the banks of Lake Como.

A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own. This is common sense.

Companions, in misery and worse, that is what we all are, and to try to change this substantially avails us nothing.

A good Cuban cigar closes the doors to the vulgarities of the world.