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!

Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano.

I don't know where there can be so many pianists as in Paris, so many asses and so many virtuosi.

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.

The earth is suffocating... Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive.

England is so surrounded by the boredom of conventionalities, that it is all one to them whether music is good or bad, since they have to hear it from morning till night. For here they have flower-shows with music, dinners with music, sales with music.

Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.