“Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing.”

Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.

This music was her-the real plain her…This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard.

The writer must hew the phantom rock.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses.

There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.

But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.

Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.

And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.

Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.

People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.

We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: “Who am I?” “Why am I?” “Where am I going?” – and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.

I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? …They fall in love with a woman. They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax.

The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

Richard Fliehr does not make any money.

Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.

Any effects created before 1975 were done with either tape or echo chambers or some kind of acoustic treatment. No magic black boxes!

I don’t differentiate between this one sin struggle than any other.

I’m suspicious of any mode of transportation that requires a running start.

Well, if you ask any filmmaker how they got into it, everyone came a different route.

There’s never any real problem fitting guitar and organ together.

I don’t write songs for myself anymore. I only write songs on assignment.