“This is the first thing I have understood:Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.”

“I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.”

“Men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet. These I have tried to remind of the excitement of jazz and tell where it may still be found.”

“I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action.”

“You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.”

“I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.”

“I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.”