Who can do anything after Beethoven?

You believe happiness to be derived from the place in which once you have been happy, but in truth it is centered in ourselves.

No one understands another's grief, no one understands another's joy... My music is the product of my talent and my misery. And that which I have written in my greatest distress is what the world seems to like best.

There is no such thing as happy music.

No one really understands the grief or joy of another. We always imagine that we are approaching some other, but our lines of travel are actually parallel.

Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?

I am composing like a god, as if it simply had to be done as it has been done.