beautiful December grapes, blue as plums, every grape a little skinful of sweet, tasteless water

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.

You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.

By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

Knowledge alone benefits no one unless the person acquiring it does something with it. And great ideas are worthless unless they are implemented.

Yes, I am a prisoner of sorts, but my prison isn't the house. It's my own thoughts that lock me up!

I think all shows change as they age as do the people who make the shows. As do the people who watch the shows. All targets are moving.

I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.

If we mix only a moderate minority share of turds with the raisins each year, probably no one will recognize what will ultimately become a very large collection of turds.

I'm perfectly healthy.

And I specialize in fixing things up and restoring them to their former glory.” She wondered if that talent extended to humans, maybe even humans who never really had a former glory.

Many of the things which can never be, often are.

Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.

Nobody who cooks does it with full hair and makeup in front of a TV camera.