"When you are doing portraits, you have that intimacy with someone for a few minutes. For a really good portrait, you don't take the portrait - it's given."

“Once Donald Trump announced that Betsy DeVos was going to be his Education Secretary - a few months before I finished the manuscript - I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. He was going to overturn as much of what Barack Obama did, and the attendant social progress, as he could.”

“Iraq is the central battleground in the war on terror. The terrorists certainly know what is at stake, which is why they are pulling out all the stops to derail our efforts there. They know that a free and democratic Iraq is a serious blow to their interests.”

“Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art.”

Source : Arthur Symons, Roger Holdsworth (2003). “Arthur Symons: Selected Writings”, p.84, Psychology Press

“Note to self: being Kurt's son, being an ex-mental patient, getting into Harvard, having written a book, and being a doctor are all things that in and of themselves do not make a life. If you lean on them too hard, you'll find that there's not much there. But if you add up a lot of things that aren't in and of themselves enough, it almost starts to add up to something....”

“When I arrived in New York I was definitely the worst player in town! It was just a measure of how far I had to go. It took years, while I was at Juilliard I worked different weekends with different people.”

“The next great task of science is to create a religion for humanity.”

“Whatever you lend let it be your money, and not your name. Money you may get again, and, if not, you may contrive to do without it; name once lost you cannot get again, and, if you cannot contrive to do without it, you had better never have been born.”

“Jerk equals narcissist.Narcissists tend to be risk takers. Risk takers happen to do better in general in businesses. So jerk equals narcissist, equals risk taker.”