“Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.”

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.

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.

truth … is the first casualty of tyranny.

To sleep is an act of faith.

There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation – at least so it seemed to me.

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.