The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone

It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.

You have to work at relationships. You can’t just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.

Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.

Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.

One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.

Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.