Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.

Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.

In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.

William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.