Australia is a country not so much of fulfillment as of theatrical expectation.

Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.

Leningrad ... is a city with the gift of timelessness.

I was not a believer in instalove. So said the rational part of my brain.

Please don't continually say I'm paranoid.Why?It makes me paranoid.

If we must die, we die defending our rights.

Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.

I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.

When the Italians play the Germans it'll be fascinating. Mightn't be very good football but it'll be great psychology.

It seems kind of silly, but it's really nice to chill in the kitchen with a friend and bake. It relaxes me, and mixing is probably my favorite part.

It is almost impossible to convince people who are under the influence of ideological bigotry that whose whom they regard as belonging to the enemy species are human.

My youth coach told me he'd got these two great 15-year-olds. I told him I don't want to know, because by the time they're 18 I'll be dead.

Time is the turning over of days, works change for better or worse.