The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it it is the mainspring of everything now is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise gratifies its curiosity and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

I think that different pleasures work for different readers - a friend of mine won't read anything that's not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot but I'm a sucker for humor and strangeness.

It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world.

Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but once you do it it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.

It has never been and never will be easy work! But the road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair even though they both lead to the same destination.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

I hope that what you take away from my album is not just the music - which I did want to be fun and I did want it to be about individuality but please also take away from it that there's no dream that's too big.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly not only as to the things which I have explained but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.