Handel understands effect better than any of us -- when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt.

The whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind so that I can survey it at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What delight this is I cannot tell!

True perfection in all things is no longer known or prized - you must write music that is either so simple a coachman could sing it, or so unintelligble that audiences like it simply because no sane person could understand it.

I choose such notes that love one another.

I will gladly give lessons as a favor, particularly when I see that my student has talent, inclination, and anxiety to learn; but to be obliged to go to a house at a certain hour, or to have to wait at home for a pupil, is what I cannot do, no matter how much money it may bring me in. . . I am a composer and was born to be a Kapellmeister. I neither can nor ought to bury the talent for composition with which God in his goodness has so richly endowed me. . .

When I am traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly.

To win applause one must write stuff so simple that a coachman might sing it.