My days had a pleasant identicalness about them. I had always liked that: I liked routine. I liked being bored. I didn’t want to but I did.

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.

I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater.

...And in freedom, most people find sin.

So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

A taste so profound and complex that it can't even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, tastes like love without the fear of love's dissolution.

My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

I lay my cheek on his solid back. I realize this is the real Jacade. The man who’s strong and fierce, but vulnerable and damaged. Confident and dominating, but generous and kind.

Set a beggar on horseback and he will ride a gallop.

This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion.

I’m not investigating race as much as I’m investigating intimacy.

Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.

I don't think Bollywood is only mindless cinema, but a lot of films they churn out are not films that I completely enjoy watching.

I have always written only for myself - to clarify things, to clarify things with myself, to understand in an inner way what is actually happening.

I have been married for 58 years to the same woman. Our secret? Separate bathrooms.

Wisdom and joy arise when you learn to exist now rather than in the nonexistent past or future.

To turn away a guest is poorest poverty; To bear with fools is mightiest might.