“There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.”

Porches are America’s lost rooms.

How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations.

I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.

Italians’ relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.

Food is my drug of choice.

What you desire you call into being.

it’s perfectly possible to hate one’s fat and to love one’s body at the same time.

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.

Kindness and intelligence don’t always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.

Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.

Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.

In memory Venice is always magic.

Silence is the garment of light.

We should conquer ourselves, rather than conquer others. Whether coming or going, standing, sitting or lying down, our mind should be focused in this way.

I admire the ones who keep coming back and doing it, time after time.

The knock-out punch is always the one you never see coming.

There was a coming and going of Al Qaeda militants and leaders between Afghanistan and Pakistan for several years.

I think of art as coming from daily life, daily experience. I think it’s very important not to have it become work for some kind of elite circle.

The Taliban had become deeply unpopular and were actually discarded by the Pashtun population almost as quickly as they were in the north. I don’t see the Taliban coming back in any way.

If this be the Messiah, then I do not wish to see his coming

When people are coming to Krakow and we show them how and where we practice, they are like, ‘Seriously?