“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”

Trouble’s made us kin.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Jews are not fit for Heaven, but on earth they are most useful.

I have nothing to tell except travellers’ stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.

If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

It’s never too late to be who you were meant to be.

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

I think I dislike what I don’t like more than I like what I like.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

It’s never been seen that a street artist go as far as I’ve gone – keep consistent without wanting to do a bunch of ventures outside of music to keep my face out there.

With ‘Lady Macbeth,’ I had two other things offered to me, and they would have also been very fun, but you just have to figure that out. And then you do it.

I’m not talking about Russia in my music. I’ve never been to Russia. I’m not talking about Africa, Switzerland, China.

Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That’s so many pages longhand.

Everything’s a film idea if this is what you do.I’ve always been secretly confident that I’d never run out of ideas,because I’ve never had any.

I’ve been more content with just who I am.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.