“Composing gives me great pleasure... there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.”

“I don't gamble, because winning a hundred dollars doesn't give me great pleasure. But losing a hundred dollars pisses me off. ”

“Intoxicating joy it is for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, the world once seemed to me.”

“True happiness is always self-forgetful: it loses itself in the object of its joy. As the joy of the Holy Ghost fills us, and we rejoice in God the Holy One, through our Lord Jesus Christ. [. . .]Love and joy ever keep company. Love, denying and forgetting itself for the brethren and the lost, living in them, finds the joy of God. ‘The kingdom of God is joy in the Holy Ghost.”

“The logic of cross and resurrection, of the new creation which gives shape to all truly Christian living, points in a different direction. And one of the central names for that direction is joy: the joy of relationships healed as well as enhanced, the joy of belonging to the new creation, of finding not what we already had but what god was longing to give us.”

“Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.”