Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.

The language of music is common to all generations and nations; it is understood by everybody, since it is understood with the heart.

Answer them critics with silence and indifference. It works better, I assure you, than anger and argument. . . .

Eating, loving, singing, and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool.

Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity.

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind.