The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of

To see itself through, music must have idea or magic. ... Music with neither dies young though rich.

To start writing about your life is, from one standpoint, to stop living it. You must avoid adventures today so as to make time for registering those of yesterday.

If you read reviews of concerts, the word 'creative' comes up all the time. However, performers playing music usually aren't creative. Critics might say they are, but they're just playing another persons work. They didn't create it.

composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest . . . she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists. Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death.