If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place.

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.

Compassion is not complete if it does not include oneself.

Nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out.

I went to a psychoanalyst. He explained things about my love life that I found very impressive... almost scary.

The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open.

Players are spoiled by charter airplanes, the finest hotels, a big per diem every day.

I wasn't understanding enough about drug addition. No one seemed to know much about drug addiction. Things like LSD were all new. No one knew the harm. People thought cocaine was good for you.

I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.

Each time I play a song it seems more real.

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.

True happiness is born of letting go of what is unnecessary.