Some men are more interesting than their books but my book is more interesting than its man.

And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.

They put arsenic in his meat And stared aghast to watch him eat; They poured strychnine in his cup And shook to see him drink it up.

Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough.

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;The wind it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

The last hour from midnight had lost half its quarters, and the stars went lifting up the great minutes.

The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.

Oh I have been to Ludlow fair, and left my necktie God knows where. And carried half way home, or near, pints and quarts of Ludlow beer.

Decide what your truth is. Then live it.

The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you've got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things.

I find myself going to places where I really have no business, speaking to these people in a whole other field that I have no extensive knowledge of. But I do it very often because it scares me.

I'm an optimist in my heart - I'm a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother - but a pessimist in my head. I think that's the dialectic we all need to be in.

Im one of the boys, no better than the last second violinist. Im just the lucky one to be standing in the center, telling them how to play.

No matter what you wear, not everyone is going to understand what you're saying.

All the arts are based on the senses. What they do for the person who practices them, and also the persons interested in them, is make that particular sense more active and more acute.

You do not boo an Olympic Gold Medalist. I'm the best in the world. I came here for you. You don't boo me.

In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.

When you fall in love you recognise you're not the most important person in the world, and your focus becomes another person.