As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

Letter to Edmond Galabert, and G. (October 1866), as quoted in Letters of Composers: An Anthology, 1603-1945 (1946) edited by Gertrude Norman and Miriam Lubell Shrifte, p. 241