For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life.

Life can't be all that bad,' i'd think from time to time. 'Whatever happens, i can always take a long walk along the Bosphorus.

Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.

Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere

For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.

Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.

To savour Istanbul's back streets, to appreciate the vines and trees that endow its ruins with accidental grace, you must, first and foremost, be a stranger to them.

After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy.

You're the little spoon, aren't you?

So you're quite right that when... as the Cold War grew and expanded out of Europe, we ourselves had to take refuge behind the shield of the Monroe Doctrine.

I do write by hand. I just think - I don't know, it's a physical thing for me. It's a bodily thing. It literally has to earn its way through my hand.

‎Perfect? How can you define a word without concrete meaning?

Marina sighs. "Love's a tidal wave," she says. "Because it sweeps you off your feet?" I ask. "No. Because it sucks you under and you drown.

When you change from being a part of the problem to being a part of the solution, allow somebody that.

There were decades I didn't play sober. I thought, Who would want to? But at some point, I decided that if it was important enough to me to keep doing it as art, I should do it with all my tools.

But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!

All societies are historical.

I'm keenly aware of the Pride coming before the Fall . . . but I really do like what I've been able to do here.