You cannot fake effort; talent is great, but perseverance is necessary.

Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.

You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.

The library is every child's lighthouse. It is every person's sanctuary. It is every town and county's fortress in the face of ignorance, intrusion and bad behavior.

Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms.

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

Be real and unashamed. Even of your faults.

Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

Is it better for a woman to marry a man who loves her than a man she loves.

All good art is political. Between the lines of every book, the author implants messages for the unsuspecting reader. If not, what point does it serve?

This is the only perfection there is, the perfection of helping others.

L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle (The love that moves the sun and the other stars)

Marriage is like a dull meal with the dessert at the beginning.

No, It's hard to uproot yourself and really become yourself in another soil, but it's also an opportunity, another kind of growth.

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fesh and honest. Whe you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

My films can be considered political action against the tyranny of good taste.

Beauty is found in the way you treat others.

In the opening stage of most careers any attention is what you want, any attention is good attention, even if it's bad attention.

It is absolutely forbidden to repay evil with evil.