Take my hand and grow young with me. Don't rush. Don't sleep. Be a beginner. Light the candles. Keep the fire. Dare to love someone. Tell yourself the truth. Stay inside the rapture.

How strange it is, sometimes, which conversations or events stays with us while so much else melts as fast as April snow.

Sicily could only be an island, less by the caprice of nature than by her own insolence. As though she might have quit Italy had she not already been born separate from it.

most crimes are connected to hunger. One hunger or another.

Some people are born empty. All manner of good deeds and patience and loving kindness can't even begin to fill them up.

We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it. We were children loving our children. And that's who we are still.

There isn't an agony in the world more powerful than tenderness

We're all who we are endlessly.

We violate the innocence of things in the name of rationality so we can wander about, uninterrupted, in our search for passion and sentiment.

A child can die even in the safest place on earth- its mother's womb!

We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations - we're doing everything we can to keep our marriage together.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.

I can deal with it now, but 13 is a tough age to be recognized and famous. It's a tough age, period.

I believe that a lot of our striving after the symbols and levers of success is due to a basic insecurity, a need to prove ourselves. That done, grown up at last, we are free to stop pretending.

I can't imagine being anything creative in a major town because everybody's doing the same exact thing you're doing. How can you not get confused about what you yourself are doing?

You don't have to underestimate your audience anymore. They'd actually like to laugh a little bit. So, the character came to me and once it's got its grips in you, there's nowhere to go.

There's the psychotic ambitious side of myself that wants a fashion line and my own network and be like a combination of Oprah and Gwen Stefani. And have a perfume. Definitely a perfume.

In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.