Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

Music has no limits of a life-span.

If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.