“Ascetic rigor? This doesn’t mean something like ‘renounce’ or even a ‘lack’ of something. No, it means, in philosophical manner (and especially in the historic Greek sense of ‘Askesis’), a special kind of internal yearning, a special power wherein, despite all depressions, defeats, and failures you develop a new power to ‘keep’ to something, to create something. It’s something like an obsession. Bach, Mozart, Schubert, they all (and their oeuvre) are filled from this phenomenon, and it’s this spirit which keeps this music so vivid and alive – and fashioned for all times and generations.”

Source: Requiem for a Dream

Source: Norwegian Wood

Endgame (1957)

Oui interview (1979)
Context: Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn’t mean you’ve reached them. With reading comprehension being what it is in the U. S., you can safely toss that one out the window. If you want to judge by the listening habits of people who buy records, the first thing they do is put it on and talk over it.

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, asked by Mr. Leno if he had been practicing bowling in his Washington Office https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HOBTUCv4o0 (March 2009) "YouTube"
2009

The Price (1967)

Open letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák, Communist President (8 April 1975)
Context: Life cannot be destroyed for good, neither … can history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique … something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.

Source: We'll Always Have Summer