Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
- The only love affair I have ever had was with music.
- You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second-rate Ravel. (to George Gershwin when declining to instruct him in composition)
- Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.
- We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.
- I begin by considering an effect.
- Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!
- I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces.
- I am not one of the great composers. All the greats have produced enormously. There is everything in their work — the best and the worst — but there is always quantity. I have written relatively little.
- My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition… is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation.