Music, from being an ordered succession of sounds, has become a matter of "sonorities", and anyone who can produce a brightly coloured brick of unusual shape is henceforth hailed as an architect.

Nothing is so common as to see a political upheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because the names of the leaders and their parties remain the same.

Once embarked on a course of sensationalism, the composer is forced into a descending spiral spin from which only the most experienced pilot can flatten out in time.

People shouldn't have to earn kindness. They should have to earn cruelty.

The problems of the past.How the problems of the past, uncorrected, inevitably became the problems of the future.

I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.

The misery in war-torn Afghanistan is reminiscent of images from the Thirty Years' War.

A full beard looks cool.

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

No one is free until we are all free.

I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.

Wicca has been, up until the past decade or so, a closed religion, but no more.