The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.

Music is only love looking for words.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.

Why should their liberty than ours be more?

Be fearless. Write what you want. Write how you want. Create art.

Air is no less heavy because we do not detect its weight.

I get a choice every time I have to open my mouth: that it can be with civility and dignity and grace - or not.

Inability is often the mother of restriction, and restriction is the great mother of inventive performance.

It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.

To really enjoy the better things in life, one must first have experienced the things they are better than.

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

I really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up a lot of oxygen from my time and my creative thinking.

Centering prayer is a training in letting go.