All afternoon in the deck chair, I try to describe to my notebook the colors of the water and sky. How to translate sunlight into words?

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

Dont tout «avoir» effectif doit tirer son prestige immédiat et sa fonction dernière.

Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.

I associate wisdom and grace with age.

We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.

I am a Christian and a Democrat, that's all.

I needed to be accepted, not humored. I intended to act.

I'm not afraid of silence. You know, I'm not afraid to sit in a room and have the conversation drop into silence. I think that's a very southern thing.

To a real child anything will serve as a toy.

Of course there are always exceptions, but opinions are not to be feared.

If there's a truth and nobody knows it, is it still true? Or is it like a light burning in a locked, shuttered house that nobody will ever get to see?