The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

Adolescence is like cactus.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source.

You cannot save people. You can only love them.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.

Volumes are spoken when nothing is being said.

No children were harmed or neglected during the writing of this book.

How could I have been so stupid to ignore everything I’d had in my life? The color red alone was worth kingdoms.

Just think, the shoes I wouldn’t be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in.

I have some sarcastic sides of me.

Man is more sensitive to the contempt that others feel towards him than to the contempt that he feels towards himself.

As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.

Sweet it is, when on the high seas the winds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the land on another's struggles.

Human nature is a scoundrel's favorite explanation.

I love clothes, but really I don't have that much to say about skirts. Before I was writing, I went to fashion shows only when the designer was a good friend and I was there to show support.