I like big, open, spare landscapes. There's lots of room. Nobody bothers you... I feel as if I can think there.

Perhaps despair is the only human sin.

Ritual which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with rushing, irreducible conditions of life.

Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.

I understood why war zones are called 'theaters' because they frame a kind of play acting or, worse, deceit, that can stain a human life forever: the deceit of hate on hearsay - hating an enemy one doesn't know.

To long for love, to have experienced passion's deep pleasure, even once, is to understand the mercilessness of having a human body whose memory rides desire's back unanchored from season to season.

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.