I believe that it is sometimes less difficult to wake up and feel that I am alone when I really am, than to wake up with someone else and be lonely.

Oh, those wonder-filled evenings when acting enables me for a short moment to have more life.

I think of all the choices I never knew. And those I let be made for me - to please, from fear, for love. Where did they disappear to, those choices that I never made? They are all part of who I am. They are the legacy I leave behind, they are the finished portrait of myself I cannot change.

If a person is found dead here, a postmorten will always reveal whether he has spent less than three weeks in the city. That is the length of time it takes this pollution to invade the body, after which it is there forever.

Books have always been living things to me. Some of my encounters with new authors have changed my life a little. When I have been perplexed, looking for something I could not define to myself, a certain book has turned up, approached me as a friend would. And between it's cover carried the questions and the answers I was looking for.

We are equal human beings, and we were born with evil and anger and misunderstanding of what a man is, and so we are as needy and wanting to be part of him, as he, obviously, was needing and wanting to be part of us. And that's why I've really taken the freedom, because it's an adaptation, to give her a voice.

The Summer Book is beautiful and warm, with the kind of wisdom we can adapt to our everyday lives.