If the newspapers cut me up so much that I shall not venture before the world again, I have resolved to become a house painter; that would be as easy as anything else, and I should, at any rate, still be an artist!

To be a great composer requires immense experience... One acquires this by listening not only to other men's work, but above all to one's own!

It's a huge Carthusian monastery, stuck down between rocks and sea, where you may imagine me, without white gloves or hair curling, as pale as ever, in a cell with such doors as Paris never had for gates. The cell is the shape of a tall coffin, with an enormous dusty vaulting, a small window... Bach, my scrawls and waste paper - silence - you could scream - there would still be silence. Indeed, I write to you from a strange place.

They want me to give another concert but I have no desire to do so. You cannot imagine what a torture the three days before a public appearance are to me.

Nothing is more odious than music without hidden meaning.

Man is never always happy, and very often only a brief period of happiness is granted him in this world; so why escape from this dream which cannot last long?

After a rest in Edinburgh, where, passing a music-shop, I heard some blind man playing a mazurka of mine.