Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet.

Don't be too dismissive of children. While it's true that few children are artists, all artists are children.

Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.

Divine fires do not blaze each day but an artist functions in their afterglow, hoping for their recurrence.

Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.

It's not evil that's ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.

Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.

If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist.

The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty.

The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.

Nothing is a waste that makes a memory.

The nature of power is such that it can never be understood.

Timing can be everything and wisdom requires the patience to wait as well as the courage to leap when the time becomes right.

It was settled by the Constitution, the laws, and the whole practice of the government that the entire executive power is vested in the President of the United States.

Desire is endless and unappeasable, is most intense where most forbidden, and is never far from despair.

Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.

For the first four years, no new enterprise produces profits. Even Mozart didn't start writing music until he was four.

To me it's a question of being able to look backward and give the present a root... To give meaning to where we are today, we need to look at where we have come from.

If a caterpillar doesn't know its future has wings, it hardly experiences itself as land-bound.

Chris Huhne is a remarkably successful and powerful minister

I've done it! I have become a summoner!