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

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

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.

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

Are we being good ancestors?

My wandering has led me to the beginning of our journey together. I suppose it's only fitting for me to be here at that journey's end.

I have a very dark sense of humor.

I find that more and more I'm trying to entertain myself when I'm working, because I know the work's going to go to a horrible place.

I was schooled at home, then didn't go to university because I married when I was 17. I didn't go into work until late in my life.

The second attention is the occult side of the being. It is the ability to manipulate others, be it for good or ill intent.

My idols are Janis Joplin and Annie Lennox, who are neither of them from the typical pop culture.

Of course, I thought I was badass at sixteen, too. Wait, I was badass at sixteen. Oh, yeah.

Awards are like applause, and every actor likes to hear applause.

I grew up in the South with guns everywhere and we never shot anyone. This [shooting] is about people who aren't taught the value of life.