fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.

It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.

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.

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

I think we’re [men and women] more similar. In that we all deal with our fantasy lives and sometimes are disappointed by reality.