Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them. I think if journalists start doing that then they won't be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won't be practicing satire.

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.