"New surroundings have a way of returning attention to areas that may have become rote."

“Begin with duties of a man and rights will follow as spring follows winter”

“In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.”

“Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits.”

“There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards; one associates it with national-socialism. But this has nothing to do with the romantics, whose ideal of the aesthetic state has much more to do with the republican tradition.”

Source : "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

“Practicing is not only playing your instrument, either by yourself or rehearsing with others - it also includes imagining yourself practicing. Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actually doing it.”

“The idea that I should become President seems to me too visionary to require a serious answer. It has never entered my head, nor is it likely to enter the head of any other person.”

“I strive to be professional and to push myself always to do a better job.”

“What is to be got at to make the air sweet, the ground good under the feet, can only be got at by failure, trial, again and again and again failure.”