"It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor's finger."

"Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again."

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest."

"It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it."

"Poetry “is the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.”"

"From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound."

"I genuinely don't feel that anything that's been written or said about me has overshadowed my music, and that's the most important thing as far as I'm concerned."

"The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal the good one really does."