“It was nerve-racking to begin with but once I started and the audience accepted it I relaxed. It has been surreal.”

“Everyone has a different format for how they want to reveal what they are thinking, or what they are seeing, to the audience…I just had to let go of the audience and just started thinking about what I wanted to see.”

“Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness”

“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”

“I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.”

“I can't quit, once I've started. I've been told I'm pathologically persistent. I can't quit.”

“That war in which I had been sheltering, convinced of having accepted it, of having made my own uncomfortable peace, grew more ferocious, bit deeper, reached into one's nerves and brain.”

“I don't think that American audiences would accept the tonal character of my music.”

“The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.”

“I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.”