If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.

The longer I live, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.

The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.

In love, it is better to know and be disappointed, than to not know and always wonder.

Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.