"For nearly twenty years I have been..." - Quote by George Bernard Shaw

“Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition.”

“The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.”

“It is not enough to know what is good: you must be able to do it.”

“No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.”

“Sometimes I'll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I'll just remember it.”

“I don't know what to say about this book. The experience on which it is founded is so extraordinary, that an honest record of it should be preserved . . . But it would have driven me mad; and I am not sure that the author came out of it without a slight derangement.”

“I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.”

“The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.”

“The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.”