A musical audience is at best uninspiring, at worst definitely drab. ... Respectability hangs like a pall over the orchestra and the boxes; a sort of sterile sobriety ill-fitted to the passionate geometry of music.

Infants are interesting only to their parents.

Artists never make wars. They are too busy making life out of the matter of their visions.

Promiscuous ... was a word I had never applied to myself. Possibly no one ever does, for it is a sordid word, reducing many valuable moments to nothing more than doglike copulation.

Good-fellowship, unflagging, is the prime requisite for success in our society, and the man or woman who smiles only for reasons of humor or pleasure is a deviate.

In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.

It is television's primary damage that it provides ten million children with the same fantasy, ready-made and on a platter.