True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

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.

The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.

It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.