an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive.

If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?

Everyone is wrong about the future.

If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.

It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.

Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but it's too late, because a whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn't know a thing.

A healthy social life is found only when, in the mirror of each soul, the whole community finds its reflection, and when, in the whole community, the virtue of each one is living.

If masturbation is a crime then I should be on death row.

Terrorists are not 100 feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill.

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.

I'm not Tom Cruise. Very few British actors are. If you look at the body of work I've done it's pretty obvious I'm not going to make a 'Mission: Impossible.'

Having a good constitution is far more important than having an immediate constitution.

Faith is like the Himalaya mountains which cannot possibly change.

The internet has created a transnational audience. If you publish something in the New York Times, it's read all over the world. Who knows how big this audience is or how long it will last.

Sydney Poitier, who said to Lester Maddox, Guess who's not coming to dinner? Never got a dinner!