“The horn . . . is the joint hardest instrument to learn. . . . (The other is the oboe).”

“By the age of eleven it was . . . too late for the piano and the violin.”

“[W]ithout travelling one remains a poor creature; that goes especially for people in the arts and sciences! [Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart]”

“If we are willing to spend hours on end to learn to play the piano, operate a computer, or fly an airplane, it is sheer nonsense for us to imagine that we can learn the high art of getting guidance through communion with the Lord without being willing to set aside time for it.”

“I didn't set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.”

“Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.”

“Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer might have died long ago.”