The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Lord Melbourne

Music is mediator between spiritual and sensual life.

Ludwig van Beethoven

I didn't get my degree at NYU I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.

Jim Jarmusch

An angry father is most cruel towards himself.

Publilius Syrus

In case of doubt, do a little more than you have to.

Warren Mitchell

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.

Carlos Fuentes

I work very hard, but when God opens that door for you - when life opens that door for you, I should say - I think it's important to be giving, to return the love back.

Lady Gaga

I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.

John Singer Sargent

Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition.

George Bernard Shaw

HAMLET [...] we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that's the end.CLAUDIUS Alas, alas.HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.CLAUDIUS What dost thou mean by this?HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

William Shakespeare

Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder.

Victor Hugo

Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson