All art is a kind of confession.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.

He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.

The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution. Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go.