“To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse - German.”

“veni vidi vici”

“In this world . . .It's Heaven when:The French are chefsThe British are policeThe Germans are engineersThe Swiss are bankersAnd the Italians are loversIt's Hell when:The English are chefsThe Germans are policeThe French are engineersThe Swiss are loversAnd the Italians are bankers.”

“Women wanted men who made money, women wanted men of mark. How many classy women were living with skid row bums? Well, I didn't want a woman anyhow. Not to live with. How could men live with women? What did it mean? What I wanted was a cave in Colorado with three years' worth of foodstuffs and drink. I'd wipe my ass with sand. Anything, anything to stop drowning in this dull, trivial and cowardly existence.”

“As far as boyfriends were concerned, I dated, had a lot ofmeaningless relationships and that was pretty much it. It was reallyhard to find a decent guy. A guy that would be worthwhile. Theywere all great in the beginning, sweet and caring, sensitive andromantic. But if you scratched deeper, you would find NOTHING.Plenty of nothing. Sometimes one might even be surprised just howmuch nothing there was, but not me. No. Somehow, I had learnedto brace myself for the worst. But, to be honest, it wasn’t alwaysthe case. Some of the guys weren’t that empty beneath the surface,some even proved to be quite the opposite. True-Prince-charmingkind of guys... And their girlfriends! They were even more charmingprincesses when they found out. Well, I guess we all have our littleflaws... So, after some time, I was finally coming to terms with thegenuine truth that there was no such thing as a perfect boyfriend.On the other hand, Melina was waiting for her prince on awhite horse, and was honestly expecting him to show up single. Nomatter how many times I’d tried to convince her that all a girl getsfrom that prince-on-a-white-horse fairytale is actually and inevitablya horse and no prince, she never believed that.”

“I observe that there is a good deal of German music on the programme, which is rather more to my taste than Italian or French. It is introspective, and I want to introspect.”

“An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”