Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

He wants to live on through something - and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. All of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.

I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.

I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead.

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit

Controlled hysteria is what's required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It's agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.

The job is to ask questions - it always was - and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.