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

You are only young once. At the time it seems endless, and is gone in a flash; and then for a very long time you are 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.

I realize that it is as one ages and loses one's natural force that one is at the mercy of heredity. The young are themselves: the aging, their parents' children.

I do apologize for writing by hand - and so badly. I shall soon be like Helen Thomas, notoriously illegible. In her last letter only two words stood out plain: 'Blood pressure.' Subsequent research demonstrated that what she had actually written was 'Beloved friends.

There are not enough poems in praise of bed.