To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.

Leningrad ... is a city with the gift of timelessness.

[Travel seems] not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.

Life wants you to thrive in the domain of your own unique creative vision for your yourself.

More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort.

I didn't like having secrets. Secrets only ended up hurting people.

More in sorrow than in anger.

It's not some big event that creates the drama, it's the little things of everyday life that bring about that drama.

Under Hillary Clinton, the world's largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion.

When in doubt, resort to animation.

I'd love to go and camp out and live in a tent in the middle of nowhere and see how long I could live and survive.

Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.

Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might. Whoever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight.