Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.

Leningrad ... is a city with the gift of timelessness.

[Travel seems] not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.

People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.

Halloween is fun, but it wasn't always my favorite holiday. I think Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

I love my country and I love my league.

The congressman sends out a tremendous subpoena, they want to see the e-mails, and they delete the e-mails. I can't think of anything, in terms of we're talking about, much more serious than that.

Let that ethical philosophy therefore of free-will be far from a Christian mind.

Women are asking what privileges their own breadwinning buys.

My father was a proctologist and my mother was an abstract artist, so that's how I view the world.

He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule.

When you find yourself a mom, you will be by no means seriously by itself with your ideas. A mother usually should think twice, once for herself and once for her boy or girl.

Too many words are lit for a beast of burden.