I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.
Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII of France, had such an aversion to roses that she could not stand seeing one even in a painting.
But there is one place where a person can make choices that will lead in a small way toward greater sanity in dealing with the natural order. That place is the private garden.
When I need to be precise about a plant, I use its Latin name, even if my nongardening friends sometimes look at me a little funny for using big words in a dead language - or in the kind of horticultural Esperanto that botanical names make up.
Show me a person without prejudice of any kind on any subject and I'll show you someone who may be admirably virtuous but is surely no gardener. Prejudice against people is reprehensible, but a healthy set of prejudices is a gardener's best friend. Gardening is complicated, and prejudice simplifies it enormously.
I cannot walk into our garden without constantly being reminded of the friends who have shared their plants.
The gardens I love best are those that are still affectionately tended by the people who own them and who made them - who planned and planted and replanned and replanted them, who dug in the dirt and moved hoses and watched the gardens change with the cycle of the seasons and over the passage of years.
When you work on an album for three and a half years, you're kind of ready for it to get out there. To have your songs reach people.
New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?
You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity.
My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.