Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.

Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.