Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

If you never love you never hurtIf you never hurt you've never lived.Love in life and embrace all the pains that come with it.

My voice dropped when I was 14. And when I was 14, I might have weighed 75 pounds. So you can imagine how strange that must have been: like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet.

No great spiritual event befalls those who do not summon it.

I usually tell people I watch like '24' and 'Prison Break.'

Once upon a time, I awoke in a strange place.

If a man does not work at necessary and good things, then he will work at unnecessary and stupid things

Music was not invented by the composer, but found.

It didn't feel organic and [Tito] Gobbi was one of the artists that was able to, along with Maria Callas, incorporate not just the sound, but the emotion, the technique of the singing.

Dance, and make joyous the love around you. Dance, and your veils which hide the Light shall swirl in a heap at your feet.

If my father could have sat up in bed and said goodbye, I'd have pressed the button. I wouldn't have been able to see for crying, but I would have considered that a duty.