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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music possesses much richer means of expression and it is a more subtle medium for translating the 1000 shifting moments of the feelings of the soul.

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

I like the plot of The Nutcracker - not at all.

The creative process is like music which takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity

So do not waste my time. It is the most precious thing I have, time. It is the most precious thing any of us have.

Do feminists have a sense of humor? Yes.

You throw a perfectly straight line at the audience and then, right at the end, you curve it. Good jokes do that.

Everyone should fail in a big way at least once before reaching forty.

How totally unexpected," he declared, then proceeded to faint from blood loss.

We protect aspirin bottles in this country better than we protect guns from accidents by children.

So time doesn't count, and place does?' I said this to tease her. When I was a man, I liked teasing her and she went along with it, consenting, for it reminded us both of a sadness that had passed.

I could never be lonely without a husband, but without my trinkets, my golden gods, I could find abysmal gloom.

I always work directly from life, partly because I really enjoy having an interaction with the person in front of me but also because I love having a direct response to shape and color.

There's more chance of me flying Concorde to the moon blindfolded than there is of you taking Wales to the World Cup.