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

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.

[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.

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

Uniqueness is what makes you the most beautiful.

Sometimes I wonder if I would've been more successful if I wasn't acting and I concentrated on other things. But I love being on set. I love working with my 100 crew members.

I've been lucky and have played some interesting characters - I'd quite like to play Sweeny Todd.

What I did suffer when I was young was because I was sort of a hick coming into New York City. I was made fun of by a lot of the Factory people. Even Andy Warhol thought I was a hick.

One possibility for difficulties innovating is that most people really donÕt care about innovation.

because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

I don't think looking at things through the prism of fear is going to accomplish anything.

Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won't notice. My heart is a stopped geranium.

Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.