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

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.

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

My mother was my first jealous lover.

Weather creates character.

Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.

I love medieval cities; they do not clamor for attention; they possess their souls – their riches – in quiet; formal, courteous, they reveal themselves slowly, stone by stone, garden by garden; hidden treasures wait calmly to be loved and yield to introspective wandering.

If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.

Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

Insanity is a lack of proportion.

The past can be tamed and controlled.

I didn’t become successful until I became myself.

Don’t rob the world of who you are by trying to be someone else.

Since God made us originals, why stoop to be imitations.

[International law] doesn’t show what the Constitution originally meant, and it doesn’t show what is fundamentally important to Americans today. It shows what’s fundamentally important to somebody else today.

Nobody can tell your story the way you can tell your story.

I’m crazy, and I don’t pretend to be anything else.

Be you. All of you. Without consequence. Without judgment.

A penguin cannot become a giraffe, so just be the best penguin you can be.