Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.

I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality

I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.

I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.