I think I've become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don't think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany.

The trick is not how much pain you feel--but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.

You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.

Each artist or writer who works in Venice comes to believe that the city yields its most special secret to him or her alone.

what storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.