“Schoenberg is too melodious for me, too sweet.”

The fanatics for progress often have too little appreciation of the existing.

Unhappiness doesn’t grow on the chest like leprosy. Poverty won’t fall off the roof like a loose tile, no; poverty and unhappiness are man’s doing.

When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.

It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality.

A theater without beer is just a museum

When the house of a great one collapses Many little ones are slain.

Terrible is the temptation to be good.

Would it not be simpler If the Government dissolved the people and elected another?

All artforms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.

Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.

We often do not know ourselves the grounds On which we act, though plain to others.

People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.

The finest plans are always ruined by the littleness of those who ought to carry them out, for emperor himself can actually be nothing.

There are some with brains and some without. It makes for a better division of labour.

Their peace and their war Are like wind and storm. War grows from their peace.

I’m in good form, taking no interest in things, neglecting clothes, meals, company, and feeling calm and stable as I write.

I had no musical training at all.

It’s the opposite of that. Engineers in lab coats have created a musical experience that is so crisp and clean, it can literally improve your hearing.

I get a different kind of lyric from someone else that might make me go in a different musical direction.

I really believe musical form will go on. There’s got to be a way of making musical form in cinema live again.

Got my Allman Brothers cassettes stacked up on the dash, got some Jack back in the trunk and a tank full of gas.

I always like to think I build in historically accurate musical in-jokes that are so precise that like maybe there’s 7 or 8 people in the world watching the show that will sit up and go, “Oh my God the music being played is the right kind of music!”

Did ole Hank really do it this way?

I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.