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.

Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.

A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.

Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either.

If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully -- as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.

In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.