You are only what you are when no one is looking.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

Kenneth Koch

The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard --it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much.

E. M. Forster

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it's a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

David Byrne

At some glad moment was it nature's choice to dower a scrap of sunset with a voice?

Edgar Fawcett

'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.

Marquis de Sade

Don't make music for some vast, unseen audience or market or ratings share or even for something as tangible as money. Though it's crucial to make a living, that shouldn't be your inspiration. Do it for yourself.

Billy Joel

When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.

Plato

I find my wife hath something in her gizzard, that only waits an opportunity of being provoked to bring up; but I will not, for my content-sake, give it.

Samuel Pepys

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

Tom Waits

If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Take only what you need and leave the land as you found it.

American Indian Proverb, Arapaho

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

W. Somerset Maugham