“Never to have lived is best. And the second best/is to grow old with the morning into/afternoon, and then to evening, when sundry shadows and gestures marry/like the vanished divisions of a shut fan.”

“Never claim anything or anyone is the best. Always second best…leaving room to maneuver.”

“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.”

“You know how some celebrities have fans of the opposite sex, who imagine they’re going to marry them and live happily ever after? I have a different thing. Over the past 15 years I’ve had a few female fans who’ve gone overboard and been upset because we didn’t become best friends and go shopping together.”

“We live in a time when automation is ushering in a second industrial revolution, and the powers of the atom are about to be harnessed for ever greater production. We live at a time when even the ancient spectre of hunger is vanishing. This is the age of abundance! Never in history has there been such an opportunity to show what we can do to improve the quality of living now that the old, terrible, grinding anxieties of daily bread, of shelter and raiment are disappearing.”

“.. the light suggests no particular time of day or night [in the paintings of Paul Cézanne ]; it is not appropriated from morning or afternoon, sunlight or shadow.”

“The gesture that divides madness is the constitutive one, not the science that grows up in the calm that returns after the division has been made.”

“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.”

“Time, they say, must the best of us capture,
And travel and battle and gems and gold
No more can kindle the ancient rapture,
For even the youngest of hearts grows old.”

“I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.”