What year these events transpired is of no consequence. Where they occured is not important. The time is always, and the place is everywhere.

The functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy.

The whisper of the dusk is night shedding its husk.

Where there is cake, there is hope. And there is always cake.

Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.

Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded.

Only once in a generation does anything as fresh as a vomiting detective come along.

The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.

Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.

Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.

I want to get enough [money] to take off the hardships of life and leave me free to follow the ideas that interest me the most.

Music is what feelings sound like out loud.

Changing husbands is about as satisfactory as changing a bundle from one hand to the other; it gives you only temporary relief.

If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.

Maybe something is wrong with me but I just think I'm normal. I'm not super-skinny but I'm not super-fat. But I don't really care about what other people say.

The two countries [Pakistan and India] have already come close to nuclear confrontation twice and this could get worse. So dealing with the relationship with India is extremely important.

[On being asked in her later years if she were Tallulah:] I'm what's left of her, dahling.

I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.

Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.