It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

Marriage can wait, education cannot.

In the end, every man's life is but a tale told to him that's lived it, and to him alone.

I wasn't really a work-conscious type of person. I was a player. I loved to play sports.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood.

When I write, I picture the characters a certain way in my head, and they're not like any actor or actress. It's almost hard for me to let go of my ideas as to the way they look.

We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.

It brought Pittsburgh into the picture of football teams in the National Football League that, ‘OK, you have to deal with us now.’

Once I realized that right thinking is vital to victorious living, I got more serious about thinking about what I was thinking about, and choosing my thoughts carefully.

When you come to Germany as a Jew you have an uneasy feeling, but I've always felt okay in Berlin.

Insurrection of thought always precedes the insurrection of arms.