The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

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