I know why families were created with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.

The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.

In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.

Good things happen to those who hustle.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.