Fame separates you from life.

My father taught me that a bill is like a crying baby and has to be attended to at once.

A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.

Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.

When one is a stranger to oneself, then one is estranged from others, too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. Only when one is connected to one's own core, is one connected to others. And for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through silence.

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.