I half cherish the hope that the end of history will be Swissness.

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.

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

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.

RICH I’m lamenting. I’ve lost my innocence.CROMWELL You lost that some time ago. If you’ve only just noticed, it can’t have been very important to you.

I used to go to two movies every week for the Saturday matinee when I was a kid.

I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.

We created god in our own image and likeness!

For everyone, whatever his state--single, married, widowed, or priest-chastity is a triumphant affirmation of love.

I'm not a shill for the Democratic Party.

Take this wealth and this fame, always stay humble, keep your family close, and do ridiculously crazy things.

We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.

The things I've done in my life have required a lot of years of work before they took off.

Better were it to be unborn than to be ill bred.