Erik Satie

“My doctor has always told me to smoke. He said, 'Satie, if you don't smoke, someone else will.'”

“I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old.”

“Art has no business to be respectable.”

“The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest.”

“Why do we have to listen to a piece of music from beginning to end? I can go into a painting and walk around.”

“The public is unable to experience anything but the conventional.”

“I have never written a note I didn't mean.”

“Childhood is a thing that we must not play with.”

“Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself.”

“Experience is a form of paralysis.”

“When I was young, I was told: 'You'll see, when you're fifty.' I'm fifty and I haven't seen a thing.”

“What I am, no one can take from me.”

“A painter's studio should be a laboratory. It's not a place for conversation, but for work.”

“There is no such thing as a pretty good omelette.”

“If that's for the public, I'm against it!”