Music really is our daily medicine.
Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.
The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time. . . and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.
It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.
There are no innocent bystanders.
Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt.
Those who say only artists and architects can create are the ones who are elitist.
You ask when is it that you can say yes we have had enough. It is enough revenge and I think now we have restored the equilibrium. It never happens!
No, there's fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn about anymore and which nobody is going to get in the end anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of things and rather than listen to one's own voice, rather than walk out on the primal cause, one surrenders to the situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bearers pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on their chest.
There are two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?