You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

Under the seams runs the pain.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

Frightened that you'll be overcome by yourself? That a gentle monster inside of you might take over and never let go?

Most people take health at face value. Quite often people understand that health is the most valuable possession only after they become seriously ill.

[Alexander von] Humboldt showers us with true treasures.

Friendships are fragile things and require as much care in handling as any other fragile and precious thing.

Everything is creative. It's all relative to me. No matter what, you've gotta use your imagination, use your senses.

Here, you go to the supermarket and you have wipes to clean your hands before shopping. No, we don't have that in France, but we recycle.

My core beliefs revolve around the idea that we should live to the best of our abilities-we should live and let live.

I'm not going to have a perfect career. It's better to be Billy Wilder and make lots of movies and have five or six great ones than to make so few movies that when you make a bad one it crushes you.

Sometimes you have to understand that you push ahead, there's going to be a lot of flak, there's going to be a lot of dogs barking, but the wagon train moves ahead.

I like the fact that Jack is always wearing a tie except when he's on a mission. I do like it when I get out there and dress up, or dress down, a little bit.