"I don’t want to give in and settle for some specialty. I don't want to spend my life as Toscanini did, studying and restudying the same fifty pieces of music. It would bore me to death. I want to conduct. I want to play the piano. I want to write for Hollywood. I want to write symphonic music. I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can still do justice to them all. But I can’t do them all at once. I have to learn to do one at a time, and to give it all my strength until I’ve done it right. Mozart, Mendelssohn, Bach, Haydn -- they were all performers and conductors as well as composers, and they did a lot of other things too. Only then, there was time." Leonard Bernstein, 1957

“There are people we treat wrong and later we’re prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out - surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people."  — Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)