Rome is ... an impossible compounding of time, in which no century has respect for any other and all hit you in a jumble at every turn.

Obviously, if you don't love life, you can't enjoy an oyster.

How smartly September comes in, like a racing gig, all style, no confusion.

The fresh start is always an illusion but a necessary one.

Even the stupidest cat seems to know more than any dog.

Anybody who's against birth control and abortion has to be a criminal idiot.

It is like a party all the time; nobody has to worry about giving one or being invited; it is going on every day in the street and you can go down or be part of it from your window.

Doubt remains a luxury I won't do without.

Even a tourist can tell in a Roman street that he is in something and not outside of something as he would be in most cities. In Rome to go out is to go home.

Shame can be self-indulgence too.

Music or the color of the sea are easier to describe than the taste of one of these Armoricaines.

....I came to consider betrayal a moral violation of another's humanity—akin to torture.

A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.

What is understood by republican government in the United States is the slow and quiet action of society upon itself.

As I recall, my life as a child was so all-consuming that I barely had time to consider the future.

Owning your own feelings, rather than blaming them on someone else, is the mark of a person who has moved from contracted to expanded awareness.

I rode with four street-clothes cops in the East Village. I spent six weeks riding with them every day - in street clothes, with a vest underneath.

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

Anyone who believes he is bigger than the system is wrong.

I felt like I was living in some sort of video game and people pre-empting every move I made, obviously as a result of accessing my private information.

Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.