You may have the universe if I may have Italy.

"I adore art . . . when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear."

"Our mistake, you see, was to write interminable large operas, which had to fill an entire evening . . . And now along comes someone with a one- or two-act opera without all that pompous nonsense . . . that was a happy reform."

"They were all churning out operas of mine. It was clearly impossible for me to work under such conditions, so I hired the organs from their owners. It will cost me about 1,500 lire for the summer, but that is not too large a price to pay for peace."

"Oh blessed a thousand times the peasant who is born, eats and dies without anybody bothering about his affairs."