Water was how the desert would bring everyone together. The antelope's daily prayer, weighing the mortal need of water with the mortal danger of obtaining it.

One by one and then together the birds chanted, warbled, whistled, and cooed, like a rare desert plant bursting into life after the rain.

The breeze across the desert as the light died was so sweet she could almost drink it.

Long before the stars died the birds began to sing - cool rippling doves, loud cheery starlings, the long lilting trills of warblers and thrushes.

Dawn raced like fire across the savanna.

Faraway a leopard barked that high, dissatisfied deep roar it cuts off so sharply, as if its annoyance is too great to express, can only be appeased.

I have spent hours and hours watching elephants, and to come to understand what emotional creatures they are...it's not just a species facing extinction, it's massive individual suffering.

Already this sun was pouring its wrath into the blue Indian ocean where swordfish and marlin cruised like silver-blue attenuated warheads in their green-gold depths...

Inside her head or out in the desert was the same, and the air inside her throat was very dry to keep from crying and her neck sore from forcing herself not to look down, not to look back.

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

The vacancy in your heart doesn't connotes that nobody is seeking for the job of servicing your feelings, but because the employee must first have all the necessary credentials needed for the job.

As long as I take the responsibility of the choice, I have to make the choice that is as right as possible.

Laughter is eternity if joy is real.

My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces.

It is wise to agree that all things are one.

For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I should never have asked him to cross.

Neapolitans have always had their fast food. It's called pizza.

Some prayers are followed by silence because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than we can understand.

We want full-scale normalisation of relations [with Japan].