“The more cultured a man, the less fortunate he is.”

To regard one’s immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth.

You only have to start a job of work to realize how few decent, honest folk there are about.

Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.

Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.

Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.

Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.

Nothing can be accomplished by logic and ethics.

Everything should be first-rate in a person, his face, clothes, soul and thoughts.

A good upbringing means not that you won’t spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won’t notice it when someone else does.

If you wish women to love you be original; I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter & women fell in love with him.

Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.

In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.

Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.

You ask me what life is. That’s like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there’s nothing more to know.

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.

I think that, we as a culture, feel like politics is one sector of our lives that can feel apart from our personal lives and the cultural things we’re interested in and the sports we watch. It feels like this separate, different thing.

We live in a youth-obsessed, aesthetically obsessed culture. That is no more evident than in the film industry.

Having grown up in a racist culture where 2 and 2 are not 5, I have found life to be incredibly theatrical and theater to be profoundly lifeless.

I don’t know why it is that we need to denigrate, to knock down. It’s so sick.

Foreigners cannot bring freedom, cannot bring democracy, because this is related to the culture, to the different factors that affect or influence that society. You cannot bring it, you cannot import it.

For some reason I seem to absorb the landscape and cultures where I am planted. A State Divided Symphony was inspired by the 150th anniversary of Missouri’s entry into the Civil War.

The notion that in order to have a nation it is necessary for there to be a common language, a common territory and common culture has failed to stand the test of time or the scrutiny of scientific definition of objective reality…

If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture – not only national culture but global culture.