The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.

Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.