With maturity comes the wish to economize - to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.

Competitions are for horses, not artists.

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.

I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

Shit works out.

You may choose to live in a world of fantasy if you like, my dear, but I am a realist.

Mindfulness describes a "state of becoming" that places the individual beyond judgment and definition.

Amazing tributaries feeding where the rivers will never flow....

All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.

Fine art is that in which the hand the head and the heart of man go together.

I always get to eat what I want because if I don't, I go insane.

I can't see how a single man could spend his time to better advantage than in the Marines.

To yearn for a single, and usually simple, explanation of the chaotic materials of the past, to search for a single thread in that most tangled of all skeins, is a sign of immaturity.

No matter who or where we are, or what our capabilities, we are called to do the best we can.