Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.

Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality

The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.

At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.