Cure for an obsession: get another one.

Pain narrows consciousness; pleasure blurs it.

When Medusa looks in the mirror, she sees the Lady of Sorrows.

My passions have never jumped out of the fireplace and set fire to the carpet.

Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth

The sewing machine joins what the scissors have cut asunder, plus whatever else comes in its path.

Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

Cloud travel is well and good when you have mastered the landings. I never have. I must live, not dream about living.

People bond themselves into families and groups for protection, and strangers...strangers are always at risk.

Ideas are powerful things requiring not a studious contemplation but an action even if it is only an inner action.

I'm endlessly fascinated by parenting, marriage, my wife and the ins and outs of marriage.

I've always been really comfortable around athletics, I've just never been comfortable playing anything.

There are a few things that'll move people to pity, a few, but the trouble is, when they've been used several times, they no longer work.

As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.

That strange, twisted, torn love. That conflict between what your heart knows is right and what your mind is told is right.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.