“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.”

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.

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.

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

truth … is the first casualty of tyranny.