The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.

In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said "It is the trade entering his body.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

God, in his infinite wisdom, hid Hell in the middle of Paradise, to keep us on our toes.

Two examples of irony:...a cheap knock-off of a Chinese Ming vase…made in China....getting murdered in a graveyard.

Such is the state of life that none are happy but by the anticipation of change. The change itself is nothing when we have made it the next wish is to change again.

Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

A lot of people in my state of Vermont are gun owners.

Magic never dies. It merely fades away.

My husband doesn't know what my songs are about - even when they're about him. He's very British in that way. He doesn't ask, and he doesn't want to be told.

Most controversies would soon be ended, if those engaged in them would first accurately define their terms, and then adhere to their definitions.