People's opinions don't interfere with me.

Life is given to you like a flat piece of land and everything has to be done. I hope that when I'm finished, my piece of land will be a beautiful garden.

To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.

I shall die very young...maybe seventy, maybe eighty, maybe ninety. But I shall be very young.

As long as you don't make waves, ripples, life seems easy. But that's condemning yourself to impotence and death before you are dead.

Something pretty... that's just the surface. People worry so much about aging, but you look younger if you don't worry about it.

I have always had the urge to open forbidden doors: with a curiosity and an obstinacy that verge on masochism.

If you get trapped in the idea that what is most important is what image of yourself you're giving to the world, you're on a dangerous path.

To be free means to choose, whose slave you want to be. ­

If you want to live your life through to the end, you have to live dangerously.

To give and receive love, you have to be in touch with pain, you have to be capable of provoking it and feeling it.

She didn’t sound overjoyed. She didn’t sound even slightly joyed.

In any modern society encouraging your child to cut himself is an unthinkable act, but only with religious belief becomes part of the culture, and demands respect.

Some days I am more wolf than woman, and I am still learning how to stop apologizing for my wild.

The totality of life cannot be understood, so runs Sufi teaching, if it is studied only through the methods which we use in everyday living.

Guilt: I'm sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I'm sorry. I am a mistake.

If pursuing material things becomes your only goal, you will fail in so many ways. Besides, in time all material things go away.

I truly think that you can't go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can't go and wrestle it to the ground.

I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.

Mr. President, I love you, but you're wrong. (To Richard Nixon, on the Vietnam War)

President Obama and I can meet, shake hands and discuss current issues, we - and I am personally - are always ready for such contacts.