I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I'm not. I'm just obsessed with my work.

I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I'm not. I'm just obsessed with my work.

Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person's power. Be just to yourself.

To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.

Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village in this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that leave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable.

Those books of mine that are remunerative - I'm not talking about poetry here - take years to write, and I am never sure they'll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.

Good music is good music, but it has to be good.