I swear by this song and by all that I have done wrong, I will make it all up to thee.

Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don't know what to say.

I think there's an appetite for seriousness. Seriousness is voluptuous, and very few people have allowed themselves the luxury of it.

English, I know you ... you are German with a license to kill.

[I had a sense of interior panic].Always. I didn't really know what to call it for a long time, but I have a friend in Greece who used that word panic a lot, and I found myself resisting it, until I totally accepted that as a precise description of my interior condition. It was mostly panic from one moment to the next. And nothing much else was going on.

Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process.

I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies' man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life.