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

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

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 honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer’s habit to remember nothing good of himself.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

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

I admire Peter Mandleson’s chutzpah and the way he transformed the Labour party but not his dubious ideas about Europe and industrial policy.

And, in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity.

An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.