Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for a vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake.

It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.

If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.

Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.

It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.

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 do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.