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

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

As something has involuntarily crept into my head through my eyes,I love to indulge it, even though it may be all wrong.

England is a country of pianos, they are everywhere.

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

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

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.