What I need is to believe in myself again — for my faith has been greatly undermined; it seems to me my role is over.

Music is an incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for expressing the thousand different moments of the soul's moods.

Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.

Where the heart does not enter; there can be no music.

How can one express the indefinable sensations that one experiences while writing an instrumental composition that has no definite subject? It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric poet expresses himself through poetry...As the poet Heine said, 'Where words leave off, music begins.'

I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o'clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous.

Handel is only fourth rate. He's not even interesting.