I don't go to concerts much. I've heard everything. When I do go to movies, I walk out half the time. As for literature, I've read everything.

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.

It’s important that young people know about the struggles we faced to get to the point we are today. Only then will they appreciate the hard-won freedom of blacks in this country.

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

And I'm okay with drowning.

A kind word is like a Spring day.

California officials want to contain a measles outbreak that originated in Disneyland last month. They are in luck because everyone who is exposed to it is still in line at Space Mountain.

You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.

Holy Mother Church teaches us to end the year and also our days with an examination of conscience...to be grateful and to ask for forgiveness.

I probably don't show fear, but I suffer from fear like everyone else.

The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation to put a better face on evil than it normally wears.