I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.