The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost.

Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff

What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.

This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.