To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.