Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.

And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean a mind that questions and rejects every civilized norm.

Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".

The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies.

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.