“Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.”

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.

Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .

the islands of Italy combine all the elements – fire, water, earth, and air – and that is irresistible.

Women’s propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.

The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place into love of flesh. … Is this true?

It’s the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive – it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.

my love of water … is mingled with and almost indistinguishable from a fear of water (I can float in a vertical position – I enter a fugue state – but I cannot bear to bury my face in water).

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

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.

We all have our individual artistic temperaments as well as partisanships in creative directions. And we have strong opinions on the merits of the products of our occupation.

When you have a reputation for making not only good songs but great albums, that in itself creates added artistic pressure. But, at the end of the day, I guess that pressure is something I welcome.

Artistic vision comes from a mind clear enough to fall in love with what we see.

Artistic vision is having the clarity to fall in love with what you see.

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

We recommend for the training of teachers not only a considerable artistic education in general but special attention to the art of reading.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

There can be no ‘graduated exercises in drawing’ leading up to an artistic creation. That goal can be attained only through the development of mechanical technique and through the freedom of the spirit.