Gioachino Rossini

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

Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.

Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours.

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

I always dreamed of writing in an orchestral context. But when you finish a piece, you want to hear it. So we played everything with Phish.

The judge said I was a menace to society because I had put crime on a scientific basis.