"Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible a plea as baseball in Italian."

“No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.”

“One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright.”

“Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.”

“The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.”

“I have no patriotism, for patriotism, as I see it, is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.”

“The great problems of the world - social, political, economic and theological - do not concern me in the slightest...If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow and if half of Russia were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least. What concerns me alone is myself and the interests of a few close friends.”