The thing about stone is you don't get to the heart of it. It stares back into you, its secret intact and inviolable.

Perhaps all adult life was an attempt to keep alight the fires that burned when you were young.

One thing a death will do is make you reflect on how many kinds of love there are to be experienced in the world.

The old are a regular subject for sympathy.

The world holds no trace of what happens in it unless we carve it in with violence or concrete.

Every bar in the scores of ourselves is already into memory into imagination, even as we play it out. We might as well listen.

That's how it is with a thing like grief as well. It lies oil slick over everything you do. It will pour out through the gaps in the most ordinary afternoons.

She thinks of her mother, sitting cross-legged, sewing marigolds into garlands for the gods, telling her: "The biggest mistake we make is thinking we are powerless

An enlightened thinker does not waste his precious time thinking about what others think of what he thinks.

No one yet knows what awaits the Jews in the twenty-first century, but we must make every effort to ensure that it is better than what befell them in the twentieth, the century of the Holocaust.

One is always a little afraid of love, but above all, one is afraid of pain or causing pain.

Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.

The elevator to success is broken, take the stairs.

You just have to learn certain technical things, like where the camera is, not to block people's light in your own, to hit your marks, and that you do it kind of piecemeal.

In my heart I know the truth, but my mind cannot accept the reality of what this all means.

I met her last summer on a moonlight boat trip.

A film has a sort of life over time, whereas a TV show comes up in your living room, and its immediate, and people write about it.