After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

What is it that you long for best, that clenches teeth and claws over the ventricles of your heart?

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.

Actors, movie stars, rock stars, I can meet them with no worries - but with footballers I go weak at the knees. All of them.

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.

A word or a smile is often enough to put fresh life in a despondent soul.

Vision motivates, sustains and dispels doubt.

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.