Italy is not a country for beginners.

With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.

Any time one seeks to produce for a larger public one inevitably has to drop material that would only be understood by a particular group.

In any power game, it seems, the dominant party is the least likely to be aware of what is going on.

People want to hear about the extremes of human nature. They want things that are larger than their own lives, and more romantic, and not necessarily of their own experiences.

There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free.

I'll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.

There is lasting kindness in Heaven when no kindness is found upon earth.

It doesn't matter who you fall in love with, as long as you have love in your life.

There are three points of view to everything - mine, yours, and the truth.

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

With all her masculine vigour and glory, Greece fell, gradually atrophied, because one half of her had been, of set purpose, intellectually and politically paralyzed.

I'm a known reader. That's what I do with my time.

Even a poet cannot get everything right.