A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.

The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.

The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.

I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.