I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.

Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.

But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

It’s better to bite your tongue than to eat your words.

It doesn't do to sacrifice for people unless they want you to.

Oh, I am very weary, Though tears no longer flow; My eyes are tired of weeping, My heart is sick of woe.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

In 1973, women got 59 cents on the dollar; now we are getting 74 cents on the dollar. In the area of finance and business, we are at 68 cents on the dollar.

If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.

I'm opening a store at the end of the month in the New York meatpacking district. I'm launching a line of bedding this summer, and I am writing a book that will be out next January.

I've been in dance schools since I was four. I went to the Brit school. I did adverts and plays.

My identity is deeply intertwined with being a refugee because that's the first experience that I remember.

I guess my guitar heroes shifted from people like Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix to people like Johnny Marr or John Squire.