Italy's siren call lures us more and more.

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.

Intentions do not insulate us from the consequences of our actions.

Sometimes the challenge of beating the jet lag and getting a decent sleep can be as hard to solve as finding the right setup for the car!

Hell is a swamp, to me - not as something fiery, but as something dank, moist, and wet.

When there's a war, people get married.

Those who come forward will not be offered an automatic pass to citizenship and should be expected to pay a substantial fine or penalty to participate in the temporary program.

Ninety percent of films are pretty mediocre, but they have a built-in audience and open on 3,000 screens.

I think you see in people's eyes what they've been through. Anything in their lives shows up in their eyes.

I'm the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don't really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.

New terms used like, 'overseas contingency operation' instead of the word 'war' - that reflects a worldview that is out of touch with the enemy that we face. We can't spin our way out of this threat.

A lot of times people's main motives and plan in life is to hurt as many people as they can, but I think there's enough good people that help make the world a good place.