Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

It is my wish that you may have at better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery.

Everything should be at once surprising and inevitable.

We all make mistakes, but everyone makes different mistakes

What is to reach the heart must come from above; if it does not come from thence, it will be nothing but notes, body without spirit.

I change many things, discard others, and try again and again until I am satisfied; then, in my head, I being to elaborate the work in its breadth, its narrowness, its height, its depth...I hear and see the image in front of me from every angle as if it had been cast and only the labour of writing it down remains.

I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.