Art is born of humiliation.
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
Now is the age of anxiety.
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.