Erik Satie

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

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

“Art has no business to be respectable.”

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

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

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

“Experience is a form of paralysis.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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