Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.

What you desire you call into being.

Food is my drug of choice.

I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.

The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place into love of flesh. ... Is this true?

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

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