By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.

Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.

To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.

Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable; it can only be as it were inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence.

We cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts.

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.