Maybe I wanted children, maybe I didn't, but I wanted the decision to be a choice, not a mandate. Last time I checked, childlessness was only supposed to be a condition of career advancement for nuns.
A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
In music, as you develop a theme or musical idea, there are many points at which directions must be decided, and at any time I was in the throes of debate with myself, harmonically or melodically, I would turn to Billy Strayhorn. We would talk, and then the whole world would come into focus. The steady hand of his good judgment pointed to the clear way that was fitting for us. He was not, as he was often referred to by many, my alter ego. Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.
People do not retire. They are retired by others.
San Francisco is one of the great cultural plateaus of the world - one of the really urbane communities in the United States - one of the truly cosmopolitan places and for many, many years, it always has had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world
Tomorrow is in the wings waiting for you to sound her entrance fanfare.
Yet, every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened.
That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.
Faction is to party what the superlative is to the positive. Party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties.
I wanted to let form lead my thinking, and repetition always confronts you with the interesting problem of how to break out of a cycle that seems so deterministic, which was germane to the story's concerns.
When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.