Gioacchino Rossini

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind.

Give me a laundry-list and I'll set it to music.

One cannot judge 'Lohengrin' [by Wagner] from a first hearing, and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time.

Answer them [critics] with silence and indifference. It works better, I assure you, than anger and argument. . . .