What are some of your favorite quotations by composers about other composers?

From Tchaikovsky’s diaries:

‘I played through the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard. His music is made up of fragments of some indefinable something welded together’.

My favorite is the one you've already quoted from Haydn to Leopold Mozart. What an extraordinary man Haydn must have been to be able to say that. He was the greatest composer in the world until Mozart came along. Yet he was unselfish and honest enough to say that.

Others:

"I don't think much about that fellow Brahms. If you ask me he's just a big sissy - always hiding behind formal development resolutions, counterpoint - why doesn't he just come out like a man and say what he means" - Carl Ruggles

"Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!" - Robert Schumann (about Chopin)

No must "del_icious..."(say your're sorry): I grew to be "thick skinned" approximately my musical idol decades in the past. You ought to have simply gotten up; and it is approach beyond my mattress-time right here in Nevada; and I must be in mattress; in which I'm going after finishing my reaction. Perhaps I can arise with a extra interesting citation the next day; correct now I can most effective quote the only so much are already acquainted with who patronizes this discussion board on a steady groundwork: "He, Wagner, is not for each person". Sorry. Alberich

"a talentless bastard" Tchaikovsky referring to Brahms. Quite funny, although, I love Brahms.

"Well, Shostakovich plays with clichés most of the time, I find. It's like olive oil, when you have a second and even third pressing, and I think of Shostakovich as the second, or even third, pressing of Mahler." Boulez referring to Shostakovich. Very aggressive and unfair, in my opinion. I do like Shostakovich.

"He looks at the stars through an enema tube and dresses them up in tinsel and rags." ~ Chopin on Liszt.

"The trouble with Wagner is he talks too much: nobody talks that much." ~ Clara Schumann.

"The old Saxon, once he gets hold of an idea he never lets go of it." ~ Debussy, on Bach, on the occasion of editing both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier for the publisher Durand.

Best regards.

Oscar Levant to George Gershwin: "If you had it to to all over, would you fall in love with yourself again?"