How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.

The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.

As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.

I can write pretty much anywhere.

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.

If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

Two people who are a little bit deluded in each other's favour. That's what love is, isn't it?