“I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.”

Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I’m doing something right.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That’s one reason old men can send them to war.

I don’t think you will ever fully understand how you’ve touched my life and made me who I am.

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth)

Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.

Divorce is my generation’s coming of age ceremony – a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.

Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

Home is where your books are.

Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.

We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.

Betrayal betrays the betrayer.

In loving life you love what can’t survive.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation.

I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.

I have alternately been called an Aristocrat and a Democrat. I am neither. I am a Christocrat.

Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

A good way to work on alternate picking is to choose three or four notes, and work on those.

Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession.

I like having options, alternate lives unlived but always possible.