The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

Perhaps this very instant is your time.

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

...in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.

An ugly jar full of water is worth more than an empty beautiful one in the desert.

This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours!

There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.

I wasn't trying to make a following. I was just trying to make interesting music. That's not being modest, that's just being realistic.

Since we are already Buddhas, happy and suffering Buddhas, wise and confused Buddhas, we are already Buddha.

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

We have a right to believe whatever we want, but not everything we believe is right.

We shouldn't be putting tariffs on anything. That hurts working men and women in US. What we should be doing is making our manufacturing more competitive.

Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.

I think at this point in my life, I'd like to play more good guys than bad guys.