Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Let silence be the art you practice.

Rhythm is something you either have or don't have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

When you were young, and your heart, was an open book. You used to say, live and let live.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.

People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance.

Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies.

Rock and roll music, if you like it, if you feel it, you can't help but move to it. That's what happens to me. I can't help it.

The spoken form is in fact a very restrained representation of what is possible in the musical language.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

To play without passion is inexcusable!