What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.
It is always the same with me; only when I experience something do I compose, and only when composing do I experience! After all, a musician's nature can hardly be expressed in words.
There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.
The spirit can assert itself only through the medium of clear form.
To write a symphony is, for me, to construct a world.
The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.