To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.

I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.

Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

I'm blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that's almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I've ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it's important not to mix the two up.

We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.

As for Aliki - if you were to stand in the middle of Rome and say the name Sophia Loren, or Paris and say the name Catherine Deneuve or Brigitte Bardot, or L.A. and the name Marilyn Monroe, it's like standing in Athens, or anywhere in wide-flung Greece, and saying Aliki Vougiouklaki. A huge star - and so little known elsewhere in the world.