The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.

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.

Away with all these gods and godlings

No one knows what he can do until he tries.

There's more pressure to be famous for being yourself than if you're being a character.

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

I love my editor, but that would be the definition of hell to me to live with someone and have them go page by page through my manuscript. That I want to avoid at all costs.

Our hands imbibe like roots, so i place them on what is beautiful in this world. And I fold them in prayer, and they draw from the heavens light

We all have choices and must make them for ourselves.

Chess is like body-building. If you train every day, you stay in top shape. It is the same with your brain - chess is a matter of daily training.

Don't borrow money from a neighbor or a friend, but of a stranger where, paying for it you shall hear of it no more.