“His creation was spontaneous and miraculous. He found it without seeking it, without forseeing it. It came on his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk when he was impatient to play it to himself. But then he began the most heart-rending labor I ever saw. It was a series of efforts, of irresolutions, and of frettings to seize again the certain details of the theme he had heard; what he had conceived as a whole he analyzed too much when wishing to write it, and his regret at never finding it again, in his opinion, clearly defined, threw him into a kind of despair. He shut himself up for whole days, weeping, walking, breaking his pens, repeated and altering a bar a hundred times, writing it and erasing it as many times, and recommencing the next day with a minute and desperate perseverance. He spent six weeks over a single page to write it at last as he had noted it down the very first.”

– George Sand