Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.

Leningrad ... is a city with the gift of timelessness.

[Travel seems] not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.

When you can’t reach the standards of another’s heart you must ask yourself, "What value do I put on my soul that I would subject myself to such rejection?

GOD Can Use ANYTHING To Do ANYTHING.

places to hunt places to hide are getting harder to find, and pet canaries and goldfish too, did you notice that?

A story is not finished, until it took the worst turn.

A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.

After you have the basics down it's all mental.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Something else that makes me angry is that I got too old to prostitute myself. I wasn't going to anyway but it was there, it was my Z plan.

I will not vote to send my sons, or your sons, daughters, brothers, sisters or friends to fight for a stalemate.

Bleaching my hair for Two Moon Junction... my hair was fried and I looked like an idiot.