This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.

As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner -- if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!'

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'

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

Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.

Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.