The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.

I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life -- if I live that long.

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.

I stand for what I stand on.

The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.

A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.

The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.