Issac Stern rule: the better your technique, the more impossible your standards.

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.

We are more likely to fail as craftsmen due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability.

Authority is itself inherently an act of imagination.

The pleasures of relaxed chat, of casual conversation, encourage the ethnographer in everyone

Art helps you connect to the world, not escape from it. That is the difference between art and entertainment.

So long as we can lose any happiness we possess some.

I don't believe in the elimination of evil. But I believe in fightin' against evil.

The most heartbreaking things are the ones that are sometimes the truest.

There is your audience. There is the language. There are the words that they use.

E.T., who said to Phyllis Diller, You look weird. Never got a dinner!

Don't be so scared of dying that you stop living.

Tain't worthwhile to wear a day all out before it comes.

We had 1 book, the phone book, I've read it, it wasn't a great read, lots of characters, and on the end loads of polish people turn up.

Sorrow, like a heavy ringing bell, once set on ringing, with its own weight goes; then little strength rings out the doleful knell.