My imagination can picture no fairer happiness tha...

I cannot give a single concert at which I do not play one piece after the other in an agony of terror because my memory threatens to fail me. This fear torments me for days beforehand.

My health may be better preserved if I exert myself less, but in the end doesn't each person give his life for his calling?

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.

My age and health will never allow me to realize the dream of art I've been pursuing all my life.

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

You get to a certain age where you prepare yourself for happiness. Sometimes you never remember to actually get happy.

I learned from a very young age that if I pursued the things that truly excited me, that they would reward in more important ways, like happiness.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all you have.

I had a very happy childhood, but I wasn't that happy a child. I liked being alone and creating characters and voices. I think that's when your creativity is developed, when you're young. I liked the world of the imagination because it was an easy place to go to.

I have a huge, active imagination, and I think I'm really scared of being alone because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just turn into a madwoman.