The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous may ha… - Claude Debussy

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.

Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express. For this, I need a text by a poet who, resorting to discreet suggestion rather than full statement, will enable me to graft my dream upon his dream — who will give me plain human beings in a setting belonging to no particular period or country. … Then I do not wish my music to drown the words, nor to delay the course of the action. I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves.