Wine for Beethoven was symbolic. It was something that would bring everyone around the table to eat and drink and be equals.

The observation is often made that political conservatives do not have anything much to say about the arts, but that is not the whole truth.

Revolution has been the slogan and banner for generations of creative idealists. But they seem more concerned with a love of transgression than of life.

Counterpoint in music is like rhyme in poetry: it holds disparate things together in a unity, and at the same time it shows that unity is not simple but composed.

Modernity consists of perversions of notions drawn from Christianity; to be a modern means to be deeply enmeshed in them.