Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima

Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.

Leningrad ... is a city with the gift of timelessness.

[Travel seems] not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.

An animal in pain is the saddest thing on Earth.

I love the process of being taken from where I am to somewhere else.

Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem.

Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.

Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.

Governing involves choosing and making choices between competing goods.

In war trivial causes produce momentous events.

People want to feel effortless about their clothes. I don't always get it, I make a lot of mistakes, but that's my goal.

Many people thought I would never succeed, because I am so Russian. So Russian, hundred percent.