We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

Everyone is born a millionaire, it is your God-given right to have an abundance of everything, health, money and love.

The mass of your visions depends on the size of your dreams and distance they can cover within a given period of your life.

The amazing thing is nobody has to believe in anything all they have to do is be wiling to try.

Give me a couple of years, and I'll make that actress an overnight success.

The key to writing is something to be stolen. How else does one open the door to a house of thieves?

There's only one way to work -- like hell.

In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.

I took some comp for non-comp major classes with Giacomo Bracali and Ludmila Ulela, who was a really famous composition teacher.

Now I'm in real trouble. First my laundry called and said they lost my shirt and then my broker said the same thing.