Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.

Love was never meant to be contained solely in our hearts, just as life in a seed was always meant to break through into the world and become beauty to be shared.

There is no passion so much transports the sincerity of judgement as doth anger.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

The game is choreographed; it is mental, it is physical, it is a battle. People can feel those hits when they are in the stadium, you feel them and you see the velocity of the players.

Smiling resets your mood.

I've been invited to do a trio with a fantastic jazz guitarist and a harmonica player

This is the rock 'n' roll life, and you had to invent it as you went along. There was no textbook to say how you operate this machinery.

Life doesn't work out the way we plan, but maybe it works out the way it's supposed to after all.

You don't know how much you appreciate your privacy until you don't have it.