You see things less clearly when you open your eyes too wide.
I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely.
If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!
I think there is a certain perversity in my music in that I continue, you know, to eat at the same ball of vomit year after year.
Out of sorrow entire worlds have been built out of longing great wonders have been willed they're only little tears darling let them spill and lay your head upon my shoulder.
It's a wonderful life if you can find it.
I love America. I really do. It's by far the place I like visiting out of anywhere in the world. I get a palpable sense of excitement when the plane's landing. It's a cliché, but there's still an incredible energy about New York in particular.
We must be contented to amuse, when we cannot inform.
Human beings thrive on action. Stagnation does not wear well with us. We are said to have our origins as hunter-gatherers. We run and we chase. We are problem-solvers. We must be continuously tested and we continuously test ourselves. And it will not end until our lives end because of life itself.
When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.
Sometimes all it takes to stop traffic is for that right pair of red pumps.