I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona.

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.

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

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.

How much man likes or hates a person or a thing is dependent on how much he knows or does not know about the person or the thing.

When you're not sure your anger is justified, the thing to do is ask yourself exactly where it's coming from.

I feel like I was born and bred to stay self-motivated. I'm not one of those people who ho-hums and feels sorry for himself when something's bad.

Nothing human is foreign to us

No matter where you go, you are what you are playa.

God sometimes does His work with gentle drizzle, not storms.

Parents should not let kids listen to my music if it's offensive. I wrote these songs for me.

Sometimes, I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.

Wine is like the incarnation--it is both divine and human

Unfortunately, conflicts have always been there and they don't seem to be stopping. I'm a journalist and a photojournalist at heart, and I think that we have to be there always to cover it.