Music is the fourth great material want, first foo...

There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable.

Next to being witty, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.

Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources. In desperate straits the fears of the timid aggravate the dangers that imperil the brave.

I'm at the age where food has taken the place of sex in my life. In fact, I've just had a mirror put over my kitchen table.

My inspiration was my mom. She's a great cook, and she still cooks, and we still banter back and forth about cooking. Growing up in a mostly Portuguese community, food was important and the family table was extremely important. At a very young age I understood that.

We incorporated new tastes and flavors into our kids' diets from a very early age, which helped to develop their palates and prevented them from becoming picky eaters. We don't buy junk food and give them options of fresh fruit, yogurt, raw almonds, or dried whole grain cereals for snack time.

I've always felt that sexuality is a really slippery thing. In this day and age, it tends to get categorized and labeled, and I think labels are for food. Canned food.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

I'm well past the age where I'm acceptable. You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

A lot of music you might listen to is pretty vapid, it doesn't always deal with our deeper issues. These are the things I'm interested in now, particularly at my age.