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.

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.

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

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.

Mistakes are lessons by another name.

You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you.

Thursday? Oh no, it can't be! It's too gruesome.

The obese are eating the worst diet in the country if you define worse as ratio of calories to essential micronutrients. They're just eating empty calories.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?

Command by instinct is swifter, subtler, deeper, more accurate, more in touch with reality than command by conscious mind. The discovery takes one's breath away.

Everything changes all the time, and unfortunately, everyone who knows what you do by buying records only hears a small amount of what's going on in your life.

I guess I considered myself just sort of a sketch comedian, you know? Actual screenwriting hadn't really occurred to me as a viable job - I didn't really know anything about it.

To all the seeds that follow me protect your essence, Born with less, but you still precious.