Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.

Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself.

Balk the enemy's power force him to reveal himself.

Common sense dictates the term hot fudge sundae has a totally different meaning in prison.

I claim that relativity and the rest of modern physics is not complicated. It can be explained very simply. It is only unusual or, put another way, it is contrary to common sense.

A contemplative should pay equal attention to concentration, energetic effort and equanimity, and not exclusively to one of these factors only.

Great leaders don't succeed because they are great. They succeed because they bring out the greatness in others.

We've rewritten entire scenes and had them animated twelve hours before the show goes on the air. It's not fun.

I didn't go around the world, I went around the world on a private jet. I didn't have a hotel room, we had an entire floor. We were spoiled.

Do you think it's possible to discuss politics without preaching?