Anytime the perfume of orange and lemon groves wafts in the window; the human body has to feel suffused with a languorous well-being.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.