You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

When a diplomat says yes he means perhaps when he says perhaps he means no when he says no he is no diplomat.

You need three things to win: discipline, hard work and, before everything maybe, commitment. No one will make it without those three. Sport teaches you that.

I do all this alone, everything I achieve, I achieve alone, because it's my head I'm locked into, and I share this space with nobody but myself.

You stick a credit card in a machine, and you pay $3 or whatever it is to get cash - your own money.

Music is magic. It's my favourite drug: it really has an effect on me mentally and physically. It's such a rush.

If that's there, I believe that technology will probably step up to their part of it.

Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is.

One good thing about teaching calculus is that you develop a hardened attitude towards repeating yourself.

We're throwing money down a rat hole drain of public education! We lead the world in public education spending. We lead the world in getting the least for it.

If I screw up raising my kids, nothing I achieve will matter much.