"I have played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms -- what a giftless bastard."
"Truly there would be a reason to go mad were it not for music."
"I grew up in a quiet spot and was saturated from earliest childhood with the wonderful beauty of Russian popular song. I am therefore passionately devoted to every expression of the Russian spirit. In short, I am a Russian through and through! "
"It would be vain to try to put into words, that immeasurable sense of bliss which comes over me directly as a new idea awakens in me and begins to assume a definite form."
"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."
"Music is no illusion, but rather a revelation. Its triumphant power lies in the fact that it reveals to us beauties we find in no other sphere; and the apprehension of them is not transitory, but a perpetual reconcilement to life."
"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."
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