Rachmaninov once said that he felt "impelled to write music without any outside considerations." He was a very sensitive man who poured his soul into his music, and immersed himself entirely in his composing, so that when he perfected a piece of music, there was a piece of himself woven into it. He never categorized music into classical, romantic, modern, or any other type. To him it was simply music and he would not stray from writing what his critics called romantic music, even though he was born 30 years before the romantic era of music ended. The messages that Rachmaninov wanted to convey were always very personal and intense, which resulted in an intricate, deeply emotional style whose flavor was distinctly Rachmaninov. Though Rachmaninov's music embodied the composer himself with little outside consideration for other music, the sound produced by his compositions was inescapably Russian. It encompassed the Russian mind, particularly the idea that fate defies all other struggles against it; fate is destiny and people could not change their fate - also a personal belief of Rachmaninov. Another common quality of much Russian music is that it is fused with an underlying feeling of doom and dread. Rachmaninov's style contained the previous aspects, while adding to many of his pieces, a single point imbedded in the music somewhere that carried no other tone than that of peace and hope.