When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.

The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn.

Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.

I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.

Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.

A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius.

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep.

I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

There's an old joke about a mother watching a column of soldiers pass by. Her son is in the ranks. All those men out of step, she says, except our Fred.

The truth is that no matter how many retakes you do, each will be different and that is the nature of any creative medium. There's no such thing as perfection.

Teaching at university isn't like teaching in an art school.

There are things we can do to give us a little more attention.... I've got to look more frantic.

Culture is a little like dropping an Alka- Seltzer into a glass- you don't see it, but somehow it does something

In my home state of Indiana we prove every day that you can build a growing economy on balanced budgets, low taxes.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

When I'm running, I'm looking for contact. It's kind of weird. It brings a fire to me. When I get older I'll probably get wise and not do that.

You live as long as you dance.