About chocolate: "This is what laughing tastes like.

I like colorful tales with black beginnings and stormy middles and cloudless blue-sky endings. But any story will do.

Homework, I have discovered, involves a sharp pencil and thick books and long sighs.

When I'm drawing a picture, I feel...quiet inside.

Death's gruesome face taunts: soulless eyes, crimson grimace. I really hate clowns.

Growing up gorilla is just like any other kind of growing up. You make mistakes. You play. You learn. You do it all over again.

I think that in many ways, just as forgiveness is impossible without love, sometimes love requires forgiveness for it to work, too.

Her eyes hold the pale moon in them, the way a still pond holds stars.

Pain is life. Life is pain.

Old age is a powerful disguise.

Mosquitoes are the greatest mass murderers on planet Earth.

Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late.

Remember the friends who stuck with you when they thought you had nothing.

A heart can no more be forced to love than a stomach can be forced to digest food by persuasion.

I saw what I could [in Mexico City], but we rarely got anything other than big, mainstream American films.

The desire to be connected with the cosmos reflects a profound reality, but we are connected; not in the trivial ways that astrology promises, but in the deepest ways.

I used to hate being recognised.

Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.

I've never suffered from writer's block. I have plenty of ideas, sometimes too many. I've always had a strong imagination. If it dries up I'll stop and look for another career.

I consider myself very lucky indeed to have had the career I have. I listen to the radio now and you can't tell artists apart.

When you hit seventy you sleep sounder, you feel more alive than when you were thirty. Obviously it's healthier to have women on your mind than on your knees.