We don't catch hold of an idea, rather the idea catches hold of us and enslaves us and whips us into the arena so that we, forced to be gladiators, fight for it.

I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.

There are no people who are whole" he says. "Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how on deals with them.

The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.

Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.

Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.

one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us

At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.

I am a woman on her way to eat cake.

Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts.

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

I was born and raised in New York, but my family on both sides is of Italian descent.

If you subtracted all of the great artists who never drank, who never went to excess, you wouldn't have any more art left. What kind of poem are you gonna get out of a glass of iced tea?

Even the worthy Homer sometimes nods.

I would rather Google other people than Google myself.

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.

Money has no grey areas. You either make it or you lose it.

A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Sometimes it’s all you can do,” he murmured. “Fight back; run wild, until you get it all out.” “Sometimes there is nothing to fight and nowhere to run.