“When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.”

“Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.”

“Toward dawn we shared with youyour hour of desolation,the huge lingering passionof your unearthly out cry,as you swung your blind headtowards us and laboriously openeda bloodshot, glistening eye,in which we swam with terror and recognition.”

“When, on your dangerous mission gone,You underrate our foes as dunces,Be wary, not of sudden gun,But of your partner at the dances.”

“I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred.”

“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died.They are only sleeping at the bottom of your mind,waiting for our call. We have need for them.They represent the wisdom of our race.”

“Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.”