If that condition of mind and soul, which we call inspiration, lasted long without intermission, no artist could survive it. The strings would break ….

Sometimes I observe with curiosity that uninterrupted activity which, independent of the subject of any conversation I may be carrying on, continues ….

Madam, you ask me how I compose. I compose sitting down..

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

Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy..

Only music clarifies, reconciles, and consoles. But it is not a straw just barely clutched at. It is a faithful friend, protector, and comforter, and….

The muse doesn't come without being called..

To regret the past, to hope in the future, and never to be satisfied with the present: that is what I spend my whole life doing.

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

When Brahms is in extra good spirits, he sings, "The grave is my joy"..

How can one express the indefinable sensations that one experiences while writing an instrumental composition that has no definite subject? It is a p….

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..

Mozart is the highest, the culminating point that beauty has attained in the sphere of music..

Mozart is the musical Christ..

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

We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without….

A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood..

I feel I shall live a long time..

After the last notes of Gotterdammerung I felt as though I had been let out of prison..

…You see, my dear friend, I am made up of contradictions, and I have reached a very mature age without resting upon anything positive, without having….

I have put my whole soul into this work [The Pathetique Symphony] . . . You cannot imagine what joy I feel at the thought that my days are not yet ov….