Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately.

When you live entirely among madmen, it is difficult to know how sane you are.

It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely

The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless

After all, that was a main purpose of science: to make things of all kinds happen sooner than they otherwise would.

Everything to do with time is hideous.

At heart, women are creatures of darkness all the time.

Enchanted islands are hard to understand, ' he said. 'I've always thought that. It worried me even as a child. The trouble is that you can never be sure where the enchantment begins and where it ends.

No milk. It is black coffee, pure but strong, that fortifies against the powers of darkness with which the world is filled.

Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading.

Haven't you noticed by this time that everyone's lives are full of things you can't understand? The exceptional thing is the thing you can understand.

In the world of old memories, there's no room for visitors

At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface.

was it a vision or a waking dream? Fled is that music--do I wake or sleep?

A lot of men just don't read. They don't read fiction at all.

The first music I was exposed to was Stravinsky and I loved it but I don't remember it.

We tend to feel most comfortable, "most at home", with people whose self esteem level resembles our own.

I think bullies are very lonely people. I always tell teenagers not to bully others because it's unacceptable. We need to teach students to value themselves and to not put others down.

People going into the cities for the opportunities and the towns are getting older, no young people.

I mean, there is amazing amount of oil and gas and other resources out beneath the sea. It's staggering.

Musicians are not so concerned with language.