The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

I never saw anyone like Ty Cobb. No one even close to him as the greatest all-time ballplayer. That guy was superhuman, amazing.

Life is more or less the same wherever you go, because, wherever you go, there you are.

Now everybody is mafia. You got the Russian mafia, the Mexican mafia. Everybody is mafia these days.

We make our profits through content and services.

I love to work with Julia [Holter] because our voices have a similar timbre, and she's very unique. She finds very avant-garde harmonies that I adore.

Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.

There's always that sense of because we're so racially defined, if you're trying to cross the boundaries you don't fit into any particular space.

Although computers allow people to talk at the speed of light, no one talks that fast.

Lot of stories in deceit, how characters deceive other people, but most of all, I think, how they deceive themselves. We're not as tricky as we think we are.

It's a good feeling to see the kids try to make it, try to get to the big leagues. Everyone here has an opportunity to achieve his dream. I was lucky I was able to achieve my dream.