I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.

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.

A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.

You have to be positive, and I'm not just talking about athletics, this also applies to life.

If Allah has written for you happiness, no one can steal that from you, and if He has written for your heart to break, then no-one can mend it but He, so always put your trust in Allah.

I was processing a lot of different things and kind of looking over a lot of things and rethinking my childhood.

When Putin says good things and when we have a possibility of having a good relationship with Russia.

Making an album can be like being pregnant: you want to pop that thing out and show everybody!

Go to the club or go to the block or go hang out and things start coming.

When you're running a company, creating jobs is the last thing you want to. When you're running a company you want to employ as few people as possible, and yet you inadvertently create jobs.

I need the protection of seeming weak.

The warm green of the grass, sprinkled with flowers of many hues, is a carpet whereon we walk with noiseless tread.