I actually think leaving your children alone to fantasize, to write, to make projects on their own is good for them. Breathing down their necks is a form of control. Children should have their own space.

Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.

I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.

I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.

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.

Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.