Quotes from Allen Shawn

I find a certain degree of loneliness not only tolerable but deeply pleasurable.

Zemlinsky, who was to be on the panel of judges, played through the first few for Schoenberg and, finding them "wonderful and truly original," agreed with him that, regrettably, "precisely on that account they would have little chance of winning the prize." Schoenberg's response was not to abandon the project but to expand it.

the so-called Waidhofen Manifesto of the mid-1880s barring Jews from membership in student organizations and fraternities. He quotes these lines from that document, and they are explicit: "Everyone of a Jewish mother, every human being in whose veins flows Jewish blood, is from the day of his birth without honor and void of all the refined emotions.… He is ethically subhuman.

the fantasy, power, songfulness, beauty, and humor of the music itself has been not so much overlooked as rendered secondary to the discussion of it by experts. Instead of his reputation's creating curiosity about his work, his work has been buried by (and beneath) his reputation.

Personally I had the feeling as if I had fallen into an ocean of boiling water, and not knowing how to swim or get out in another manner, I tried with my legs and arms as best I could. I did not know what saved me; why I was not drowned or cooked alive. I have perhaps only one merit: I never gave up. But how could I give up in the middle of an ocean? ARNOLD SCHOENBERG IN 1947

The darkest day in life is the one in which we expect something for nothing.