... Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.

Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.

noise is a pollution.

I wish I could be a grandmother. It is wanton extravagance to have had a youth with no one to tell of it to when one grows old.

I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.

One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.

Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.