"I want to do nothing chic, I want to have ideas before beginning a piece."

"What a beautiful art, but what a wretched profession."

"Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice."

"As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note."