The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases - threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

I used to carry a copy of Ulysses with me everywhere just in case I was knocked down by a bus. It seemed more important than having clean underwear.

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings And some are treasured for their markings - They cause the eyes to melt Or the body to shriek without pain.

No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell. At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairsand read about themselves—in colour, with their eyelids shut.

In his autobiography Stravinsky relates that the first music he remembers was made by a peasant, working his hand in his armpit to produce a rhytmic farting.

He was making music - Howells, Finzi, Holst - so you could see the sounds in the serried air.Serried. Then just as suddenly empty when his sound-proof right hand closed off the notes.

I couldn't write—or wouldn't write, at any rate—unable to face the grueling self-scrutiny that fiction demands

I don't have to jump up and smile just because TV wants me to.

My mom modeled and made clothes, so I always had such an appreciation for design. And then Gossip Girl completely blew open the door to fashion for me.

Nature does not proceed by leaps.

Neither earth nor ocean produces a creature as savage and monstrous as woman.

Very often people give to others to control them and dominant them.

Fourier is a mathematical poem.

Making a request without revealing the feeling/need takes all the joy out of other's service.

We are not at the end but at the beginning of a new physics. But whatever we find, there will always be new horizons continually awaiting us.

Ironically, for a few million people in the Far East, I did become an English teacher through my music.