National consciousness is truly a miraculous thing. When I am not in Turkey I feel even more Turkish than in Istanbul. But when I'm home my European side becomes more apparent.

Life can't be all that bad,' i'd think from time to time. 'Whatever happens, i can always take a long walk along the Bosphorus.

Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.

Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere

For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.

Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.

To savour Istanbul's back streets, to appreciate the vines and trees that endow its ruins with accidental grace, you must, first and foremost, be a stranger to them.

After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy.

One man carries salvation and damnation from the desert.

If you feel that without a certain person, or position, or achievement, your life would be not worth living, you may be deeper into idolatry than you think.

Much later I realized that a person's attitude to pain reveals more about his future than almost any other sign I know.

Some people will like it [Fifty Shades of Grey] and some won't. I have other movies coming up, this is not what my whole life turns around.

We are miracles. So don't deny yourself the miracle of happiness.

The body, what is it, Father, but a sign To love the force that grows us, to give back What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud?

I was really fortunate growing up to have a broad musical education. My parents listened to all kinds of music, rock, soul, Motown, jazz, Frank Sinatra, everything.

I have been playing a lot of keyboards, especially in the last five or six years. I suppose it gives you more scope than the guitar, although it does tend to make you write a different way.

Men and women, boys and girls, are still bowing to the image of peer pressure out on their own Plain of Dura every week in every city of America.

I think I'm probably much better at the boots and pocket knife thing than I am at the high heels and martini thing.