...If I continued to harbour any hope for music it lay in the expectation that a musician might come who was sufficiently bold, subtle, malicious, southerly, superhealthy to confront that music and in an immortal fashion take revenge on it.

You want to be paid as well, you virtuous! You want reward for virtue, and heaven for earth, and eternity for your today?

What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent weakens--when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is ornamentation, and ornamentation, too, is a hiding place.

They're so cold, these scholars! May lightning strike their food so that their mouths learn how to eat fire!

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

When I seek another word for 'music', I never find any other word than 'Venice'

The will to truth is merely the longing for a stable world.