She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Every faculty and virtue I possess can be used as an instrument with which to worry myself.

The night before the Olympics opening ceremony, my son, who is eight years old, gets very excited and likes to put out a plate of cookies and some milk for Bob Costas.

To become aware of the subtlety of nature you need to be alert. The moment you become alert you become still... thinking subsides. That is actually a higher state of consciousness than thinking.

What's wrong with transforming food?

It was a dream to arrive at Liverpool but I never wanted to just settle for what I had achieved. I wanted more.

In any event, I don't believe in instant philosophy, because interesting problems take a long time to understand and work out. Just think of the problems of truth and justice.

I saw a human pyramid once. It was very unnecessary. It did not need to exist.

Having your own, um, cave at eighteen is pretty cool.

The only goal of science is the honour of the human spirit, and a question in number theory is worth a question concerning the system of the world.

How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?