Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields. Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness

Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away.

Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them.

Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.

You can see a person's whole life in the cancer they get.

I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.

Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us.

He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with him just so that she could cry in someone's arms. Maybe she can't cry alone, and that's why she needs me.

Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.

One pain is lessened by another’s anguish. ... Take thou some new infection to thy eye, And the rank poison of the old will die.

I gravitate towards roles where women find strength in very difficult, uncompromising situations but maintain clarity in mind, discipline at heart, and a certain strength in spirit.

The majority of autists - as well as their parents - seem to be genuine victims of environmental stress.

Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

This is earth again, the earth where I've lived and now will live once more ... I've been to eternity and back. I know how the dead would feel to live again.

We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.

It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.

There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening.

In civilized societies, we spend our lifetimes trying to become what is socially acceptable. We're dark and we're light. We all have both sides to us.