“Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.”

The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.

The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios

Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.

Making an idea into an emotion.

I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?

The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.

That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.

I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

If you don’t have a goal or purpose to strive for, I don’t think that you have much of a life. You’ve got to have something to do that you want to apply yourself to – that’s what living is all about.

Confidence breeds success & success breeds confidence, Confidence applied properly surpasses genius.

The whole slacker generation totally didn’t apply to us musically.

To understand why, submit and apply.

Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.

The results you achieve will be in direct proportion to the effort you apply.

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them.

For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it.