“Most people fear pain. I've learned that not feeling pain is a much more frightening proposition than feeling it. In fact, there are times when I'm playing when I actually enjoy it.”

“Breaking my neck was the best thing that ever happened to me. I have an Olympic medal. I've been to so many countries I would never have been, met so many people I would never have met. I've done more in the chair, ... than a whole hell of a lot of people who aren't in chairs.”

“I feel that one of the most important lessons that can be learned is that what we "see" may be different than what is actually in front of us.”

“I've experienced a great deal of pain and suffering in my life ...... most of which has never happened.”

“When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.”

“The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty.”

“Everything is just so fraught with tendentious bullshit.”