“Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.”

The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.

That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.

I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers

All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.

We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.

Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.

Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

What gets taken away are all the exterior means we thought we wanted love to come to us. You have the choice to notice the perfect set up to see love is exactly what you are.

I can spot empty flattery and know exactly where I stand. In the end it’s really only my own approval or disapproval that means anything.

What would happen if you were to allow everything to be exactly as it is? If you gave up the need for control, and instead embraced the whole of your experience in each moment that arose?

I’m interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.

We all have the same concern, but the artist must know exactly what the experience is. He must pursue the truth relentlessly

I want to emphasize the fact that we all have the same experience and the same concern, but the artist must know exactly what the experience is. He must pursue the truth relentlessly.

There is no one on earth who knew you from the day you were born; who knew why you cried, or when you’d had enough food; who knew exactly what to say when you were hurting.

That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show.