If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.

Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say

Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one

I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.