“Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.”

“One of the very best things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.”

“I want to be famous everywhere.”

“I was an elementary school teacher.”

“For me, music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.”

“Concentration is everything. On the day I'm performing I don't hear anything anyone says to me.”

“The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.”

“At the age of 45, most days in Tucson were spent feeling like I was on the summit of Mauna Kea, as I was exhibiting debilitating health symptoms that corresponded to what I saw at very high altitud...”

“The hour is only long thus, if you've waited.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“All I want to be is very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own-to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself”

“They envy your youth. You two are like exotic creatures from the land of the young.Ive never understood all that these-are-the-best-years-of-your-life crap. If this is as good as it gets then I mig...”

“But then I was young, and to be young means to undertake to demolish the world and to have the gall to wish to erect a new and better one in its place.”