The friendship of Shostakovich cast a brilliant light over my whole life and whose spiritual qualities captured my soul once and for all time.

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.

A friend should be one in whose understanding and virtue we can equally confide and whose opinion we can value at once for its justness and its sincerity.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart the excision of its memory.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee we get nervous about her and admit censorship.

The independent girl is a person before whose wrath only the most rash dare stand and they it must be confessed with much fear and trembling.

A child's fear is a world whose dark corners are quite unknown to grownup people it has its sky and its abysses a sky without stars abysses into which no light can ever penetrate.

He whose head is in heaven need not fear to put his feet into the grave.

I never feel so utterly fraudulent as when I review a movie whose charms impress all in the world and I simply do not get it. The other variant is that I love something the world disdains. This has had severe career consequences: I am still famous - or notorious - in certain quarters where I am recalled as the man who liked 'Hudson Hawk.'

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school and afterward went to work in Tokyo where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha.