"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life."

"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."

"Don't try to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."

"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible."

"The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews."

"Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings."

"How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy!"

"Time has a wonderful way of showing us what really matters."

"Aliter catuli longe olent, aliter sues. ('Puppies and pigs have a very different smell.')"

"The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."

"An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words."