For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Chamber music - a conversation between friends.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

You can only appreciate being up when you know what it's like to have been down.

Anything a man can do, I can fix.

The worst mistake is to have the best ladder and the wrong wall.

When you add a period of 25 years between the playing and the listening, then the whole question of meaning gets very complicated.

Fame grows like a tree if it have the principle of growth in it; the accumulated dews of ages freshen its leaves.

in a village you can't sack or fight with someone, as you'll find yourself stuck beside them in the hairdresser's next morning.

All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.

If you are working with people with whom you do NOT do your best work, you are out of integrity.

I just don't want to be rapping forever. I love it, but sometimes you got goals for yourself.

I love performing in front of an audience and seeing smiles on the kids' faces.