To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

If I can't eat the meal in a restaurant, and the waiter asks, 'Is everything all right, Madam?', I tell them that I'm on a diet.

The dream, alone, is of interest. What is life, without a dream?

If I make a set of rules, then a guy goes out and steals an airplane. He comes back and says, 'It wasn't in the rules.'

Marketing is about innovation.

This mixture of Polish, not Polish, of being European, gives me a perspective to see Poland through "new eyes" - paradoxically, more closely... because it's from a kind of distance.

The job of the school is to teach so well that family background is no longer an issue.

I've been a tomboy my whole life. But then you get older, you get married, you soften up.

There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.

The past is a stepping stone, not a millstone.

One can tell or do whatever one wants when one is in the Opposition but once one is running a state, one cannot do that.