Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.
Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850), French novelist. In The Works of Honoré de Balzac, vol. IV, trans. by George Saintsbury (1971). Massimilla's observation, in Massimilla Doni.
