Rome is a broken mirror, the falling straps of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballasts hidden beneath the surface.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

A real diamond is never perfect.

You use to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat, who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.

It's great to tell people you have your own show, but that's where the fun stops.

My kids, that's my biggest accomplishment. Being able to have talented and smart kids. They are doing something I didn't do. I didn't finish school so...that's my biggest accomplishment.

I'm not too fond of really cool design. I've got quite kitsch taste really, in things like tableware. I'm quite a sucker for 1930s pressed glass.

Everyone thought the acquisition strategy was extremely risky because no one had ever done it successfully. In other words, it was innovative.

A burning purpose attracts others who are drawn along with it and help fulfill it.

Normally I can balance two or three things. The problem is when you're out of work and don't have anything to balance. I think people assume you're always busy. You go through dry spells.

I had a lump on my face and had a big cancer thing removed.

Each man must learn his own ideal and try to accomplish it: that is a surer way of progress than to take the ideas of another.

The word " philosophy " carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird.