Antonin Dvorak quotes:

The Americans expect great things of me ... If the small Czech nation can have such musicians, they say, why could not they, too, when their country and people is so immense.

I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

I have composed too much.

In the Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.

The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds. Thousands pass it, while others trample it under foot, and thus the chances are that it will perish before it is seen by the one discriminating spirit who will prize it above all else. The fact that no one has as yet arisen to make the most of it does not prove that nothing is there.

Do not wonder that I am so religious. An artist who is not could not produce anything like this. I like praying there at the window when I look out on the green and at the sky. I study with the birds, flowers, God and myself.

My own duty as a teacher...is not so much to interpret Beethoven, Wagner, or other masters of the past, but to give what encouragement I can to the young musicians of America. I...hope that just as this nation has already surpassed so many others in marvelous inventions and feats of engineering and commerce, and has made an honorable place for itself in literature in one short century, so it must assert itself on the...art of music...To bring about this result, we must trust the very youthful enthusiasm and patriotism of this country.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not "pay," to use an American expression - at least, not in the beginning - and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap.