Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music-not too much, or the soul could not sustain it-from time to time.

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

You get your inspiration - suggestions - wherever you have to, even from your mother.

I am certainly not allergic to causes - particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.

What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.

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.

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