Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Chamber music - a conversation between friends.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

Keep trusting God. He will lead you in every step of the journey.

Anyone who is dreaming of a beautiful future is living in a wonderful world.

I only know one story. But oftentimes small pieces seem to be stories themselves.

We're all born an empty page.

We keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults until we at last come to look upon them as virtues.

I've been more or less vegetarian for about 40 years. Health diet really helps. I do meditation every day, and either yoga or sport several times a week.

If you keep changing for every person who tells you to, then who's going to be left? Why get the success and be somebody else?

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

When there is trust, conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of truth, an attempt to find the best possible answer.

Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.