I'm not nervous if I think about something for nine years and then I don't write it. Even if it fades it doesn't concern me. It'll come back if it's worth it.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

And I decided it really was true after all. You only really need two people to believe in the same thing, to feel as though you just might belong.

At the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that's all. Sometimes they come back.

It is enough if God approves of me and all are against me.

...For I do now know that it is cowardly. We do not have the right to think only of poetry on this earth. It is magical, but utterly selfish.

You can have a certain arrogance, and I think that's fine, but what you should never lose is the respect for the others.

The oil companies regard nuclear power as their rival, who will reduce their profits, so they put out a lot of disinformation about nuclear power.

The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing.

It's me, it's my habit to perform live onstage every four, five years. In Italy, it's my habit.

If the art is created with the whole person, then the work will come out whole. Education must teach, reach, and vibrate the whole person rather than merely transfer knowledge.

Wherever the trout are, it's beautiful.