And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Venice is ever the fragile labyrinth at the edge of the sea and it reminds us how brief and perilous the journeys of our lives are; perhaps that is why we love it so. City of plagues and brief liaisons, city of lingering deaths and incendiary loves, city of chimeras, nightmares, pigeons, bells. You are the only city in the world whose dialect has a word for the shimmer of canal water reflected on the ceiling of a room.

Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.

As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.