One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reason and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive

My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still.

The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.

The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

It was too difficult. People weren't prepared to put in the hours on the donkey work - you know, dates and facts and so on. I think in retrospect my generation will be seen as a turning point. From now on there'll be a net loss of knowledge in Europe. The difference between a peasant community in fourteenth-century Iran and modern London, though, is that if with their meager resources the villagers occasionally slipped backward, it was not for lack of trying. But with us, here in England, it was a positive choice. We chose to know less.

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.