When you're young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it's barely the beginning.

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language.

We sat there and I knew that this was how it felt to be totally accepted. You sit close to another person and are understood, everything is understood and nothing is judged and you are indispensable.

When you're young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it's barely the beginning.

Never do I close my door behind me without being conscious that I am carrying out an act of charity towards myself.

The knives in my apartment are only sharp enough to open envelopes with. Cutting a slice of coarse bread is on the borderline of their ability. I don't need anything sharper. Otherwise, on bad days, it might easily occur to me that I could always go stand in the bathroom in front of the mirror and slit my throat. On such occasions it's nice to have the added security of needing to go downstairs and borrow a decent knife from a neighbor.

Under certain circumstances the fateful decisions in life, sometimes even in matters of life and death, are made with an almost indifferent ease. While the little things-for instance, the way people hang on to what is over-seem so important.