Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

If you can remain unaffected, either when you are thrown into the abysmal abyss or when you are extolled to the skies, then you can achieve and offer something divinely great and supremely good. When the composer closes his eyes and ears to the world while composing, his inner eyes and inner ears see Heaven's beauty and hear Heaven's messages. Then he is unquestionably entitled to be in the galaxy of the Immortals.

As Mozart writes to his father, "I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame....I simply follow my own feelings."