in a letter…
“Sometimes during a trip in a coach, or when on a stroll after a good meal and in the night when I can’t sleep, that is when thoughts come to me best and in floods. Now, those that please me are the ones I hold in mind and perhaps even hum aloud, at least so others have told me. Now, if I stick to it, soon one part after another comes to me, as though I were using crumbs in order to make a pastry according to the rules of counterpoint and the resonance of the various instruments. Now that lights up my soul, that is, if I am not disturbed. Then it becomes even larger and I spread it out ever more fully and lucidly, and the thing truly becomes almost finished in my head, even when it is long, so that afterwards I look over it with a glance in my mind as if it were a beautiful picture or a handsome man, and hear it in the imagination not at all serially, as it must subsequently come about, but as though all at once. That is a treat. Everything - the finding and making now proceed in me in a beautiful vivid dream. But the listening to everything all at once is indeed the best.”
-Wolfgang Mozart