Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. 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.

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.

I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.