Quotes from Tim Page

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

They say: Belief is important. I say: No, actions are important. Judge by deed, not by creed.

The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn — the less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything.

Our God was made by men, sculptured by savages who did the best they could. They made our God somewhat like themselves, and gave to him their passions, their ideas of right and wrong.

Go where you will; commit what crime you may; fall to what depth of degradation you may; you can never commit any crime that will shut my door, my arms, or my heart to you. As long as I live you shall have one sincere friend.

It was possible to take unintended amusement from a long-standing advertisement in the Daily Journal, the city's English-language newspaper, which boasted that a venerable hotel was located "a stone's throw from the American embassy.

His answer was to read to me—in a deep, richly cadenced voice that gave me my first glimmering that words could be as eloquent as music—but it was all poetry of loss and mourning: "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," A Shropshire Lad, and T. S. Eliot. One line from "East Coker" was especially worrisome:

My memories begin in a fragrant California backyard, when I was two years old. The yard remains, infinitely smaller than it once seemed but still heady with eucalyptus oil and sudden gusts of ocean air, just as it was in 1956.

Most of the music teachers were less pleased, as I regularly corrected their factual errors while still managing to flunk their general exams.

After Caracas I no longer had a piano teacher, but I played for several hours every day and became pretty good; the first sonata by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera was a favorite, for it looks and sounds much harder than it is and is so dissonant that only a trained listener is able to discern any mistakes.

Mondays through Thursdays, students and musicians had Tanglewood pretty much to themselves. Not so on the weekends, when concert-hungry trekkers from New York, Boston, and every place in between would descend on us.

The ignorant are not satisfied with what can be demonstrated. Science is too slow for them, and so they invent creeds. They demand completeness. A sublime segment, a grand fragment, are of no value to them. They demand the complete circle — the entire structure.

I believe in the gospel of Good Living. You cannot make any god happy by fasting. Let us have good food, and let us have it well cooked — and it is a thousand times better to know how to cook than it is to understand any theology in the world.

To this day, while I admire poetic opacity in certain authors and filmmakers, I cannot tolerate it in my own work. You may or may not like something I've written, but I'll do my damnedest to ensure that you know what I wanted to say.)