Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Memory changes as a person matures.

We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality

Love me sweet With all thou art Feeling, thinking, seeing; Love me in the Lightest part, Love me in full Being.

I don't think 'Survivor' really changed me.

Education is what is left after all that has been learnt is forgotten.

My family shouldn't have to put up with me. They're good people, solid, happy. Sometimes when I'm with them I think I'm on television.

Sometimes societies die and putrefy long before they are pronounced dead, and sometimes men die of corruption long before they have taken to their deathbeds.

I'm from Chicago. My grandfather was a policeman, and my aunts are married to policemen.

In real life, I'm always in tracksuits, and I never wear makeup.

I'm calling for dialogue. I'm gathering attention for dialogue which is what you do in a struggle for power.