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

All our loves are contained in all our other loves.

Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret.

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.

[On Werner Erhard, founder of est:] If I wanted a new belief system, I’d choose to believe in God – He’s been in business longer than Werner, and He has better music.

All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.

I made the mistake of thinking that if you add up the past, you sum up the future; I forgot how frequently life astonishes us.

One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

One can be tired of Rome after three weeks and feel one has exhausted it; after three months one feels that one has not even scratched the surface of Rome; and after six months one wishes never to leave it.

To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort

In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.

Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life’s abiding pleasures.

There are no inanimate objects.

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals — and critics of the Women’s Movement.

To surrender one’s vulnerable body to water has always seemed to me a limpid act of will that has no coutnerpart or equal, unless it is sex.

There ain’t much future for a man who works the sea, there ain’t no island left for islanders like me.

So far, I’ve only sailed in the Caribbean. I’ve sailed the Virgin Island and The Grenadines. I liked all that. We charted some really crummy boats in the Grenadines. That made for an exciting sailing trip (laughs) when everything goes well.

You have to kill to survive. People have been doing it forever. I eat meat, and I eat fish. If I were on a deserted island I would need that to survive.

I wanted to make a massive work so as soon as Nick Mitzevich invited me I said yes straight away and began to make the work.

Tourism is a crucial industry that could employ millions of Filipinos, skilled and unskilled alike, cross those 7,107 islands of the Philippines.

I think one of the thing that makes a Kubrick film a great experience is the fact that he bends reality to his will and is so confident that he ends up creating something that is the island in the stream of pop culture.

Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons.

Small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos can shift the whole system to a higher order.